


Heistception

by adulter_clavis



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Heist, M/M, Strippers & Strip Clubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 16:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5632918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adulter_clavis/pseuds/adulter_clavis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Ocean's Eleven/Fast & Furious AU for Resbang 2015] Marie Mjolnir left prison with a plan. Medusa had burned down her strip club, framed her, seduced her husband, and taken her foster children. Luckily the kids are all grown up and are more than willing to help her achieve revenge via the kind of casino heist you only hear about in movies. Unfortunately, Medusa's into a lot more than gambling, and the price of failure might be very high indeed (though not, Soul thinks, as unbearably torturous as Black Star's kazoo playing or Maka's backseat driving).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The news will hit you like a punch

**Author's Note:**

> Done for Resbang 2015, this got WAY OUT OF HAND really fast.
> 
> Ref list here: http://adulterclavis.tumblr.com/post/136915753454/heistception-ref-list

Given a choice, he'd be racing, the WRX chewing through turns, engine snarling under his hands, downshifting with _precision_ and _intent_ as he flew towards the finish. He'd be in the desert, where the air was clear and clean and there was no one to bother him except Black Star, playing the Benny Hill theme on a fucking kazoo in the passenger seat instead of acting like a proper co-driver but at least Black Star was the best friend he _chose_ , at least Black Star's incredibly obvious insanity was put to good use most of the time.

Instead, Soul arrived at the run down, seedy video rental store where he worked and was offered a choice between working the back counter and processing returns, the proverbial rock and a hard place except - well. The back room was the back room, commanding probably seventy-five percent of the building's total floor space, sequestered behind a single door covered top to bottom in under-eighteen warnings and monitored by at least two different cameras. Soul didn't mind the customers, not really. Most of them were, honestly, fine. Maybe a little weird, maybe a bit awkward, maybe trying a little too hard to be friends and bond over _pornography_ , really, why would you _do_ that - no, it wasn't the people. It was simply that Soul had stared far too long into the abyss, sitting at a counter in a room filled with a really upsettingly varied and large collection of porn, and probably ninety-nine percent of the time staring at those covers - some of which seemed to be staring _back_ \- was a much more unpleasant prospect than sorting, checking, and on occasion _cleaning_ DVDs.

Except.

Today the intake bin was _full_ by the time Soul got to it, and he wasn't sure that any of the cases lacked the fluorescent orange tag marking them as adult-only titles. Unfortunately, he realized this only after making his choice, a normally _safe_ choice except for the fact that the entire world was out to get him.

"Yeah," said his coworker, glancing Soul's way as he crossed the front of the store to the bathrooms and noticing his expression, "Sarah said something about there being a lot of guys waiting this morning when she opened. Apparently a couple of them had lube warnings on their accounts, too."

"You didn't tell me this," Soul said, gingerly lifting a stack of cases out of the bin. Lube warning meant _exactly_ what it sounded like, though sometimes they got lucky and it was just a family with small children who occasionally brought back discs with spaghetti sauce on them. " _Why_. Why would you not tell me something like that."

"I've never once seen you take the back desk voluntarily, dude," came the answering call from the other side of the store. "Cut me some slack."

The bathroom door opened and shut and Soul gave the stack of DVD cases in front of him a bleak look. They were _all_ porn. With that in mind, he procured their industrial-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, some rubbing alcohol, latex gloves, and a roll of paper towels. With luck, the worst he'd have to deal with would be grimy fingerprints. Realistically, it'd be lube, but that wasn't really so bad. Sometimes, though -

"Aw geez, there's a _fingerprint of_ \- " he spat a few minutes later, surprised and disgusted, prevented from uttering the unspeakable by the pay phone outside the shop beginning to ring.

"I take it you want to get that," his coworker said, on his way back to his post in the back room. "Considering the situation you seem to have there."

"Yeah," Soul said, setting the disc down, pouring alcohol on the offending spot, and putting some distance between himself and it. "You better go see who last rented _Pirates of the Perineum_ and put a ban on their account, that shit is _vile_."

"Can do, chief," his coworker said, but Soul was halfway out the door by the time he finished the sentence.

It was convenient for Soul that he still had the gloves on when he answered the phone; the video store was hardly in a respectable neighborhood, and this particular payphone had a bit of a reputation, not to mention some questionable graffiti and even more questionable stains. That said, of all the things he was expecting when he answered a ringing payphone in a sleazy part of town, Black Star yelling "What the fuck, Soul, you live in _Las Vegas,_ you're supposed to answer payphones with something _funny_ , like 'Hootie's Morgue, you stab 'em we slab 'em, this is Eight Ball,' not _hello_ like this is the fuckin' Ritz. Give me a _break_ , I should call back just so you can try again and not embarrass yourself, you scrub."

"Star," Soul said, trying to decide between confusion and exasperation. "Why the hell are you calling the pay phone outside my work?"

" _Reasons_ , Brovahkiin. Reasons. If it makes you feel better, I'm on a pay phone too, and let me tell you it was a pain in my magnificent ass finding one. Look. Firstly, you gave me the wrong goddamn movie last time I was in there, and I'm gonna need you to bring me a gratis rental of _Titanic_ to make up for it."

"It isn't my fault that you somehow managed to rent _Knight Ride-Her_ instead of _Knight Rider_ , dude," Soul said, managing not to laugh for long enough to form a response. "And anyway, you've kept it a week past due. I think that at this point it doesn't count as an accident any more."

On the other side of the line, his friend made a dismissive noise. "You bring me a copy of _Titanic,_ I'll give you your porno back. As a bonus, I _won't_ tell your brother that you volunteered to take a set at the club this week. How's that?"

"Whatever," Soul said, pointedly _not_ leaning against the side of the phone booth and _definitely_ not dignifying the threat of a shift at the club with a response. "What do you _want,_ Star?"

He could _hear_ the horrible, shit-eating smirk in Black Star's voice when he laughed and replied, "Blonde English girls with ghetto names, you know what I'm saying? I love that shit," and hung up.

Soul's whole world did a stomach-wrenching record scratch.

 

* * *

 

Marie Mjolnir left prison with a plan. She sailed past the guards, collected her things, slipped back into the smart, tailored suit she'd entered the hellhole in, and settled into the plush leather seats of Azusa's gleaming Mercedes with a grateful sigh and a grin that could cut diamonds.

Azusa was as neat and collected as she'd been the day she'd intimidated the judge into giving Marie a light sentence - into ignoring entirely Medusa's disgusting insinuations that Marie was somehow _abusing_ her foster children, that the environment in which she was raising them was somehow _unfit_. Unfortunately, the incredibly tawdry accusations of insurance fraud via arson had stuck, though _who_ would burn down _their own strip club_ for money in this day and age Marie was certain she didn't know.

"You're all taken care of," Azusa said as her outrageous diesel engine snarled to life, and if Azusa had left her car's powerhouse engine as stock, Marie would eat her eyepatch. "Liz is supposedly putting you up for the next week, at which point you'll have found lodgings and she'll be on her way to her new gig in Vegas. She's got the recordings, and knows when to call your parole officer and leave messages, though of course you're still obligated to speak to him in person from time to time. Kilik's set you up with a phone that has the appropriate area code and a very confused GPS that thinks it's exactly where you're _supposed_ to be."

"And the kids are all accounted for?" That was, of course, the most important thing: the kids.

"They haven't all gotten on board yet, since it took me forever to locate Kid and, being as they're _your children_ , they are damnably stubborn," Azusa said, shifting and flinging the Mercedes into whiplash-inducing reverse with hardly a glance behind. "But they'll come round."

"We've got some time, anyway," Marie said, rolling down the window as Azusa turned onto the main road, laughing into the wind and ignoring the very prim, very how-dare-you-cause-my-hair-to-be-windswept look her lawyer gave her. "It'll be a little while before we can gather enough intel to put together an informed plan."

"Yes, about that," Azusa said, drumming her fingers on her steering wheel with a sigh. "Preliminary findings would indicate that things are - rather a bit more complicated than we first thought."

"Trust me, Azusa," Marie said, smile disappearing, "I've been in _prison_. I know that Medusa didn't have me framed and thrown in jail just because she had a crush on my husband."

"Well, Stein _is_ a rather exemplary fence, to say nothing of the money laundering - "

"And I'm sure he has served her well in that capacity," Marie said, remembering the day the divorce papers had come in the mail. "But it's more than that, Azusa, and I intend to find out _exactly_ what."

Azusa sighed, slowed to turn onto the highway onramp. "So long as we're on the same page," she said, accelerating hard enough to press Marie back into her seat a bit. "My rifle's in the trunk, ready to go whenever you say the word."

That earned her a thin smile. "Let's ride, then. And let's find a steakhouse with the biggest bar possible, prison food is _so bad._ "

 

* * *

 

'Blonde English girls with ghetto names' meant that within twenty-four hours Soul found himself in Florida, grappling with a humidity level that felt incompatible with life and waiting poolside while an old friend cleared his schedule for an unexpected visitor.

"So," said a distinctly amused-sounding voice, and Soul turned to see Kid heading his way, somehow immaculate despite the fact that he was in all black from hair to hi-top Chucks, pale eyes gleaming in the afternoon sun in that unsettling way he'd always had. "I haven't heard from you since Miss Marie's trial, and now you turn up on my doorstep without warning." He stopped carefully on the edge of the shade cast by his porch, a glass of neat scotch in one hand, dark brows raised to a level that Soul interpreted as 'polite suspicion.' "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You do know that the reason you haven't heard from any of us is because we can't _find_ you, right," Soul said, abandoning his nascent idea of stripping down to his boxers and jumping in the pool in favor of joining Kid in the shade, grinning while his friend set his drink down and indulging in a back-slapping hug once Kid's hands were free.

"Which, again, begs the question," Kid replied once they broke apart, reaching for his drink and smiling a little in spite of himself. "What are you doing at my house, Soul?"

"We have some family business to attend to," Soul said, which made Kid's brows climb up to a level that was more 'did you just say what I think you said.'

"Extenuating circumstances have seen fit to provide you with my whereabouts, then," he said, smoothing over his surprise with admirable aplomb. He motioned Soul into the house, giving him a meaningful Look that meant Soul followed him without a word, padding across plush carpeting and meticulously-laid stone floors to a back room that he supposed must qualify as a library, whereupon Kid did something complicated to one of the back shelves and it swung inward to reveal a set of stairs leading underground.

" _Really_ ," Soul said, unable to come up with anything even slightly more articulate.

Kid gave him a look that was simultaneously smug and exasperated. "Impressive, I know. It's taken me years to put together even this modest of a collection. Would you like to see my Dostoevsky firsts?"

Before Soul could even respond past blinking at Kid in utter confusion, his significantly shorter childhood friend had more or less kicked him down the stairs, reminding Soul that while Kid had always been _small_ , he had also always been _wiry_ , long-fingered and fast, with a certain tensile strength to him that had made him Nygus's favorite when it came to combat training.

Which brought him full circle back to the reason he was there, windmilling down slick mahogany stairs into some kind of hacker's wet dream of a basement room, something like a six monitor setup with a cot and a server rack in one corner and a drafting table in another and about a thousand freaking houseplants, and - _what on earth, really_.

"So," Kid said as he strolled down the stairs, the bookcase-door swinging back into place behind him with the kind of echoing noise and sound of bolts shooting home that Soul would have expected from a bank vault, "Miss Marie is out of prison, then?"

"Not that I believe for a second that you don't already know that, but yes. She had Black Star and me on 'medical leave' from our respective jobs almost as soon as she got to Vegas," Soul said, staring around the room and finally, gingerly, settling onto the cot in lieu of appropriating Kid's plush computer chair, which experience told him might well end poorly. "Apparently I have mono."

"Been kissing Black Star, then?" Kid drawled, and Soul sort of twitched with the not-so-latent urge to _punch him in the face_. "Anyway. What's this got to do with me?"

Soul sighed, glanced around the room again - took in what was apparently a wet bar and equally apparently about a thousand cans of Monster Ultra arranged in a precise pyramid, and one of those many screens was dedicated to Kid's security systems feed, which explained some things - and, after a moment, said, "Do you want the stated reason, or do you want to know what's actually going on?"

Kid gave him a considering look from the base of the stairs, the hand not holding his drink buried in his pocket, somehow elegant even in the halfhearted goth hacker chic that was an old NIN t-shirt and worn out black jeans.

"What?" Soul said after a minute of silence had passed, rolling his shoulders, wondering if Kid was still as particular about his things as he'd been when they were kids. "I haven't upset your feng shui, have I?"

"You're fine," Kid said, smile thin but nonetheless present as he wandered over to the bar. "You tell me the 'official' story, and I'll make you a drink."

"Well," Soul began, watching Kid drop ice into a shaker and uncork a silver-chased bottle of clear tequila, "our foster mother would like to politely request your services as a consultant on the finer points of - security."

"Yeah?" Kid asked, opening a bottle of something so electrically blue that Soul found himself slightly worried about its safety as a consumable. "Would that be contingent upon the fact that I designed Medusa's casino vault? It's completely inaccessible, you know. My designs do _not_ cut corners, and our childhood full of questionable education has taught me _very_ well how to foil thieves."

"You asked for the official version," Soul said, maybe pouting a _little_ , and accepted the drink Kid offered him.

"I did," Kid agreed, and settled into his computer chair, glass of scotch firmly in hand once more. "Drink that. It's called a silver bullet, which should tell you everything you need to know. What's really going on?"

"Medusa framed Miss Marie, that's just a fact," Soul said, blunt because there was no other way to put it. "She framed her for fraud and she turned Stein against her and she told everyone that our own foster mother had been _abusing_ us. So - naturally Miss Marie must satisfy her honor."

"Oh ho," Kid said, a little gleam of vengeful avarice in his eyes. "So it's revenge and not just a con, then. I must admit, it was a neat bit of work on Medusa's part. She's well and truly ruthless when she's after something she wants, though it's a bit funny that it was apparently easier for her to burn down Miss Marie's strip club and frame her for insurance fraud than use any of the _actual_ crimes she's committed."

"To tell you the truth," Soul said, remembering Marie and the look on her face when she'd talked about Stein, "It's definitely revenge, but it's also _definitely_ about her and Stein. I don't really know what happened between them, and I thought - at first I thought they'd planned it, you know? Like, Stein would pretend to work with Medusa so they'd have an in on her or something, but - more than anything she seems like she wants to redeem herself to him, so I really don't know, Kid. But she asked for our help, so."

"To say nothing of the inevitable millions of dollars that would come of success," Kid said, lifting his glass in a mock toast. "If she wants my advice, I will be happy to take a vacation in Las Vegas and _advise_ , especially concerning Medusa's - extracurricular activities, shall we say."

"And what would you know about _that?_ " Soul asked, surprised enough that he forgot what was in the drink he was holding and took an absent-minded swallow of what was apparently berry-flavored _battery acid_.

"Enough to feel obligated to warn Miss Marie to her face," Kid replied, so pointedly not laughing at Soul that he might as well have given up on the charade entirely. "Besides, I _did_ design that vault. It might be impossible for mere mortals to crack, but it has no gods before _me_."

 

* * *

 

"...so I told him to quit making excuses. I mean, if anybody knows what it's like to make excuses for bad behavior it's _me_ , after all. I said, 'Stein, you gotta own up to this, man. I'm gonna need you to get it together and bring it back to me, pops.' And then I left, because after that kind of real talk a man needs to be alone while he reevaluates his life and his choices, you know? Also, I really can't be seen talking to him."

"Of course," Tsubaki said, grinning into her screwdriver. "I can't believe you said that to _Stein_ , though."

"Tsubaki," Black Star said, adjusting the beanie that was currently hiding his distinctively blue hair, "the man tried to use _Plato_ to justify the fact that he _betrayed Marie_. 'Medusa is my dark horse, Star,' he said, like that gives him a pass. You know that look he gets when he's twisting shit around to make whatever horrible thing he's doing sound legit? Yeah, that was the look he was rocking. I can cram feathers up my ass, but it won't make me a chicken."

She blinked at him and shrugged. "Well, he has a point? I mean, as far as the chariot allegory goes - Medusa is definitely dragging him far, far away from righteousness, you know."

"Yeah, Tsu, sure, but the man ain't _weak_. He just pretends he is when he's having fun and knows he's doing something bad. I didn't realize that without Miss Marie to set his dumb ass in the corner with a juice box and a blanket he just _automatically defaulted_ to that kind of scrub-ass baseline, though." He took a swig of cheap beer and scoffed at it - surely for the price he'd paid he could get something better than whatever it was he'd been given, but then again, he _was_ in a casino.

"So," Tsubaki said, leaning one elbow on the bar. "Us having deadbeat father figures in our lives is hardly news, Star, and neither is you doing questionable things with feathers - "

"That was _one time_ , and it's not my fault that Soul decided we needed a bottle of Southern Comfort in our lives, okay? It's definitely not my fault that his _brother_ is a hot mess who drives him to drink." Black Star drained off half the beer in vain hopes of discovering that it had an actual flavor and sighed. "If you must know, I'm here gathering intel on Medusa. And, hopefully, recruiting _you_ , since Stein's making things difficult and we can always use some assistance blowing things up. And possibly cracking what I'm told is the world's most uncrackable safe. How's your brother, by the way?"

"Masamune is currently in the wilds of Texas trying to convert a 1970 Mustang into a drift machine because he thinks it's _Art_ , if you must know," Tsubaki said in a tone that made it very clear that no further discussion would be allowed. "I'm flattered that you tracked me down, Star. Lucky for you that I was in town for legitimate demolitions work to begin with. And I've _heard_ things about Medusa," she continued after a moment, mouth curled into a smirk as she leaned in close, confidential-like. "They tell me she uses the bones of cheaters as dice."

Black Star looked up from his beer and grinned at her. "Yeah? I heard she feeds them to the snakes in that reptile museum she's got in the back of the casino."

" _I_ heard," said the new bartender - Black Star had timed it on purpose, so that he could get a drink just as the shift changed - setting a much more expensive-looking beer down in front of Star, "that she's actually a witch, and she and that weird boyfriend of hers are sacrificing guys who owe her money to Cthulhu. They say late at night you can hear the screams in the elevator shafts."

"Makes sense," Tsubaki said, not missing a beat as she looked up and gave Harvar the kind of smile reserved for friendly strangers that one has totally never met before, no sir. "Heard she's a Parseltongue, too."

Black Star took the beer with a nod and a grin and didn't make fun of Harvar's ridiculous glasses by way of thanks. He waited for him to leave before saying anything further. "Look, Tsubaki, rumors aside? I'm pretty sure Medusa actually _does_ feed people who cross her to those bigass Nile crocodiles she has in her menagerie back there. I haven't been here long enough to have _proof_ , but I might just sneak in one of these nights and go looking for bones."

"I'm sure Marie would be touched to know that you're willing to wrestle giant crocs for her," Tsubaki said, setting some bills on the bar to pay her tab.

"I'm the _Black Knight_ , baby, they don't stand a _chance_ ," he retorted, following her lead and sliding off his bar stool.

"Oh, so you really are working at that tacky Excalibur place?"

" _Excuse you_ , I am a _knight_ ," he reminded her, and even held the door open as they left.

 

* * *

 

Azusa got them to Vegas in impressive time, in part because she, as a sniper and a lawyer, was accustomed to laying in supplies that could be consumed on the go with no interruption of the task at hand. It helped that the Mercedes had a back seat large enough to serve as a rather decent bed - certainly no worse than she'd had in prison - and Marie took her turn as a driver without complaint. Las Vegas was, outwardly, as she'd left it, glitz and glamour the thinnest of veneers over a truly seedy interior that was at least honest about its character.

They went to see Black Star's show, and while Azusa and everyone else seemed to think it was a bit ridiculous, Marie ate her gloriously delicious and messy meal with her fingers while she watched her boy tear up the other knights in the joust, puffing up with pride when he got in a few full-on back handsprings in heavy armor before allowing the white knight to win their duel. He whooped with joy and mischievous delight when he saw her waiting for him after the show, standing still only long enough for Azusa to explain that they needed him to start gathering information on Medusa before enveloping Marie in a crushing hug and literally _bounding_ off to find a pay phone.

The _truly_ ridiculous thing was Spirit Albarn, whom she found passed out on a couch in the back of the club the next day, half drunk and mostly naked, built like a debauched Greek god despite the fact that he was pushing forty, had a grown daughter, and by all accounts lived on cheap booze and cheaper sex. The routine he did once she and Wes had tipped him off the couch gave no hint of his age or the habitual abuse he inflicted on his body, though. He gave the whole club bedroom eyes as he moved in perfect time to a really filthy remix of _Pour Some Sugar on Me_ , a crowd of girls younger than his daughter squealing every time he removed an article of clothing or rolled his hips with particular flair. When Spirit came backstage his rhinestone-studded thong was full to bursting with bills and he pulled one free so he could tuck it into Marie's bra, giving her a blinding smile and a crushing hug before pulling her into an expertly-done dip, at which point Marie remembered that Spirit was a really _great_ dancer of _all_ types.

He escorted her out into the club proper after that, sat her down at the bar, made sure she had an umberella'd cocktail, and then just gestured expansively towards the stage.

"Wait'll you see this," he said, and his grin had gone from sunny to _evil_.

That was when Jack Off Jill's cover of _I Touch Myself_ started blaring from the speakers, the bass line alone enough to get the female anatomy in gear, and Wes Evans strutted onto stage in some kind of bondage cowboy getup that nearly made Marie spit her drink directly into Spirit's laughing fuckboy face.

"This is _illegal_ ," she said, staring at Wes's gyrating form with a dry mouth and the distinct feeling, for maybe the first time in her life, that she was probably going to hell.

"He's twenty-five," Spirit said, calmly taking a sip of his gin and tonic. "This was legal _before_ you went to prison. Still, though," he continued, leaning back against the bar with a leonine grin, "they do grow up so fast, don't they?"

"Spirit, I _cannot_ watch this, I raised that boy," Marie said, taking a desperate, huge gulp of her drink. "Please tell me that Soul isn't doing this too."

"Oh, definitely not," Spirit drawled, eyes still glued to Wes's increasingly-bare chest. "He just DJs here part time and lives in one of the upstairs apartments. Star takes a turn once in a while, though. Always does quite well, too."

"Well, isn't that lovely," Marie said, realizing abruptly that half her drink was gone. "Look, Spirit, we've got work to do. I'm gonna need you to stay sober - _comparatively_ sober - until we pull this job off, all right?"

"You know I don't let my vices interfere with my work, Marie," he said indulgently, voice warm and eyes fond; Marie blushed and remembered just _why_ Spirit was so good at his job, which primarily consisted of charming sensitive information out of people.

"Good," she said when she'd stopped feeling like a teenage girl with a crush, which, at her age, thankfully didn't last _too_ long, even in the face of Spirit's considerable charm. "Here's what we need to do first, so we can put together an informed plan…"

 

* * *

 

Maka Albarn was sitting at the bar when Soul walked into the neon-shadowed main room of the strip club a few days later, and Kid actually _swore_ at him when Soul stopped dead in his tracks and the shorter man collided with his back.

"I'd have thought you'd have grown past the point of being immobilized by bouncing tits," Kid snapped, pushing Soul to one side so he could head for the back door. It was when he'd gotten about three steps past Soul that he noticed Maka, nursing a Coke and staring with bored indifference at Blair's skull-pastied, outrageously massive boobs, and paused long enough to give Soul a sympathetic look before continuing backstage with perhaps more haste than he'd displayed before.

"Some things never change," Soul grumbled to himself, watching Kid walk away before taking a steadying breath and turning to face Maka, who was, herself, watching Kid go with an amused lift to her eyebrows as she took a long swallow of Coke.

Then she canted her head back to see who Kid had come in with, and the affection on her face disappeared so quickly that Soul could have been convinced it had never been there in the first place. Before she could outright get up and leave - which would, Soul presumed, be her default reaction given how things had been between them the past several years - he sidled up to the bar, taking the seat next to her but very carefully keeping a polite distance between them. For a moment he considered taking a page from his brother's book and pasting on an ingratiating smile, trying to charm her into relaxing and acting like things were fine, but this was Maka Albarn and he'd known her most of his life. Not only would she see through the attempt, she wouldn't appreciate it _at all_ , not even from the perspective of Soul having good intentions.

Besides, taking Wes's advice had literally _never_ had good results for him. With that in mind, he just settled onto the stool without comment, doing his best to ignore her stare despite the fact that it nettled his skin the same way that leaving the video store after midnight did, when there were guys eyeing him from the corner and he had to walk his coworker to her car. "Hey, Maka," he said, waving the bartender over so he could order a screwdriver. Between the rapid-fire flights to Florida, spending a few days in close quarters with Kid while they _drove back to Nevada_ , and now _this_ , he really needed something to steady his nerves.

"Soul," she replied at length, once the drink was mixed and Soul had wrapped grateful hands around it. "I suppose you've kept up with your driving, if Marie's brought you into this."

Well, _yeah_ , he and Black Star won races all the time, but - "It's good to see you," he said, very carefully, letting his eyes warm, letting his mouth slip into a tired half-smile, hoping she'd decide to take it as a peace offering. "It's been a long time."

The look she gave him said 'not long enough' so clearly that there was no reason to voice the sentiment. Instead, she contented herself with "At least you're not dead, I guess," and told the bartender to bring her some rum for her Coke. "If you're going to insist on talking to me _and_ I'm going to have to work with you, I'm going to need it," she added when Soul raised an eyebrow.

"Oh," he said, stung, perhaps a bit in anger, "it's _me_ that drives you to drink? It's not your father next door, stripping for girls younger than you?" The look she gave him was like staring into the sun, so he added, "I know that Wes doing the same thing drives _me_ to it," in an effort to _not_ find out if she had any knives or guns hidden under her ancient bomber jacket. He didn't know what she did for work these days, but this was Maka, so - for her _not_ to habitually carry weapons would be the strange thing. Kid might have been one of Nygus's favorites when it came to combat training, but Soul had seen Maka beat him in a one on one fight.

"There's a reason I'm on the ladies' side with Blair," she said, voice clipped, "and I'll thank you not to bring up my father's current profession unless you absolutely must. There's also a reason that I was the only one at the bar until _you_ showed up."

Soul shrugged and grinned a bit in the face of danger. "I figured that was more because Blair's mostly naked and all these guys wanted a better view," he said, which made Maka roll her eyes and shift just enough to give him a glimpse of a knife on her belt. "Also, give your dad a little credit - the stripping isn't really his _primary_ job, you know."

"Which is exactly why, if he had _any_ sense of decency, he _wouldn't be doing it,_ " she snapped, and snatched the shot of rum the bartender had brought over out of his hand, foregoing any pretense of mixing it into her drink in favor of pouring it down her throat with alacrity.

" _Hey_ ," Soul said, leaning a bit away from her, surprised and yet not, considering.

She gave him a disgruntled and suddenly very tired look out of the corner of her eye, holding out her glass so the bartender could actually add liquor to her Coke. "It's because he's my father," she said by way of explanation. It wasn't, Soul knew, an excuse; Maka was disinclined to indulge in those. "I'd be lying if I tried to act like it didn't bother me. Your _brother_ stripping doesn't bother me. Much." She took a determined swallow of her now-spiked drink. "It's not like I'm judging them for _being strippers_ , it's just - "

"Awkward," Soul supplied, and she nodded, the standoffish cast to her expression softening for a moment into something almost familiar until she remembered that they weren't on good terms. "Anyway," he continued after a moment, when he'd had a moment to enjoy some of his own drink and Maka had schooled her expression back into studious dislike, "I assume you're here to help us gather intel? Marie won't be contacting most of the others until we have a full idea of the situation and a working plan."

She gave him a Look. " _You're_ here to help gather intel? Does Marie know that you're technically in Medusa's employ at that horrible little porn shop?"

"Can you _please_ not say that out loud, no one is supposed to know," Soul hissed, startled - that she knew, that she _didn't_ know well enough not to _talk_ about it, that she apparently held it against him somehow. "Of _course_ Marie knows, why do you think I work there? Were you actually under the impression that I had lost all ambition and resigned myself to cleaning questionable liquids off of porn DVDs for the rest of my days?"

"Well," Maka said after a moment, looking down at her hands on the bar before grabbing a stack of coasters and soft of shuffling weirdly through them, cardboard clattering against the bar. "You didn't - "

Suddenly as that, she was gone, slipping off the barstool with abrupt speed, drink in hand and striding determinedly towards the back room while Soul blinked in blank confusion at the space where she'd been.

He was still blinking when a tall, very muscular man dropped his weight unrepentantly onto the bar stool on his other side, a beer already sweating in his hand, and growled, "Chicks're crazy, man, let that shit go or you'll go nuts."

"Yeah," Soul said, somehow managing to ignore the way his skin was prickling, because Giriko was _not_ on his list of people he was willing to make small talk with, _ever_. He'd thought that was mutual, but apparently Justin wasn't around and the man was feeling lonesome. "Who knows what the fuck goes on in their heads, right?"

" _Damn_ right," Giriko responded, voice a bass rasp, and clinked his beer bottle against Soul's glass before shotgunning what was left of it and yelling for another.

Soul downed his drink in one long go, slapping a bill down on the bar so he could make a hasty retreat and slipping backstage, but definitely _not_ by the same door Maka had used. Blair winked at him as he passed the stage, hips swiveling in time to her current song - _literally_ titled 'Strip Tease,' earning her zero points for originality but definitely full credit for pertinence.

At least Marie's strip club was _clean_ , Soul thought as the door shut behind him, remembering his current workplace and a few poorly-thought out excursions circa age nineteen _._ It was tasteful, even. The back hallways were nicely lit and nicely decorated; nothing seemed cheap, including the employees. It helped ease his nerves a bit, being in familiar and comfortable surroundings after days of cheap hotels and Kid's dagger-sharp elbows in his sides at night because of _reasons_ , including but not limited to having to stay at the kind of ramshackle establishments that didn't look too closely at their IDs and only took cash but which also charged a hefty extra for more than one bed.

At least now he could go up the back staircase to the apartments on the third floor and pass out in his own bed, thick with soft blankets and familiar, _clean_ sheets that weren't the health equivalent of Russian roulette, to say nothing of Kid's absolute skin-crawling _loathing_ of them that meant everything had to be rewashed _immediately_ -

"Hey, little bro, welcome back," said his brother's voice, and Soul's thoughts stuttered to the same abrupt halt that his body did, pulling up inches from Wes. His brother was grinning at him from his _very slightly_ superior height - the same infuriating, vaguely mocking but nonetheless affectionate grin that Soul had spent his entire life trying to wipe off of his brother's face by any and all means necessary - and he had to take a deep breath to quell his instinctive reaction of _you wanna go_. At least Wes was merciful enough to be _clothed,_ sporting his 'I'm respectable I swear' strip club manager outfit instead of his _actual_ _stripper_ ensemble. "Did you and neo-Neo have fun on your road trip?"

" _Firstly,_ " Soul snapped, and okay, maybe he hadn't quelled his sibling-inspired urge to start a fight, "that's insulting to Kid, Neo wasn't even really The One. Secondly, _shut up_. Thirdly, why are you standing between me and my bed?"

"You drew the short straw, baby brother," Wes said, grin widening if anything, and Soul felt his shoulders slump in preemptive defeat. "Marie's here, everyone _else_ is here now that you've brought us Kid, and you and I need to go procure food for everyone so we can have a comprehensive meeting. Azusa's getting kind of twitchy about it, between you and me, so let's get this over with before the lack of proper bureaucracy drives her insane and we all get capped."

"You're telling me that I can't have a nap because you somehow lack the strength to _wrangle takeout?_ " Soul asked, too tired to really protest. "You didn't even warn me about _Maka_."

To his credit, Wes dropped the grin and gave him an apologetic half-smile. "Look, Soul, I tried, but - it isn't my _fault_ that there's not a lot of cell signal in the middle of the desert, you know? Pick where we're going, and I'll buy you something to make up for it."

"Marie gave you money to buy food, you wouldn't be buying me _shit,_ " Soul said, letting his brother steer him towards the club's staff entrance. "I accept your offer of a favor, though, the details to be decided at a later date when you actually have something I _want._ "

"Sure," Wes said, as if promising a favor with no stipulations didn't bother him in the slightest, giving Soul a weary but very genuine smile that he didn't see on his brother's face very often any more.

"We're getting Chinese," Soul said a minute later, once Wes had guided him outside and over to his ancient diesel Mercedes that had formerly been Azusa's. "Especially since your car is going to give me whiplash when it tries and fails to shift into drive."

"Get in the car and be glad I saved you from Marie cornering you and Maka at the same time about just why you two don't talk any more," Wes said, settling into the creaky leather of the driver's seat and somehow finessing his prehistoric transmission into gear instead of into dropping onto the pavement. "We'll go to Jade Palace, how's that?"

"Perfect," Soul said, half asleep as soon as he sat down, daydreaming about dim sum.

 

* * *

 

Barely an hour later Soul found himself crammed into the club's usually locked back meeting room with something like two thirds of his extended adoptive family, scarfing down unhealthy amounts of Chinese takeout in what he knew was an automatic stress-related reaction. He wasn't about to stop, though, because free food was free food and it was _delicious_ , and anyway it gave him an excuse not to talk to Maka _and_ not to acknowledge the knowing smirks Black Star was giving him over a massive plate of chow mein.

"All right, kids," Azusa said, standing to address them once she'd finished her food - well ahead of everyone, in part because of her much more advanced skill with chopsticks and in part because Azusa never ate what Soul would consider a normal quantity of food - "let's get down to business. As you probably know, Medusa's casino sponsors one of the largest off-road races in the country. This year's race is set to kick off approximately one month from today, so we need to move fast if we're going to get our hands on all the extra cash the casino will have on hand for the event. You are the preliminary team, along with Liz, who is our inside contact and who is presently at work so that she can have an alibi. We have a lot of information to gather in a short period of time, and you're the ones we picked to do it. I'll be working with Kid, Harvar, and Kilik on getting into Medusa's security systems - we need _all_ of her video feeds, preferably access to her security comms, and, in a perfect world, her in-house servers."

"I've got a friend who's a genius with this stuff," Harvar said when Azusa paused, wiping crumbs from his mouth and rolling his eyes at Black Star, who had taken that opportunity to loudly cram an entire eggroll into his mouth. "You might remember him - Ox? He has this miserable call center job and he always _loved_ Miss Marie, I'm sure he'd love to get in on this."

"Oh, I remember him!" Marie said brightly. "Very smart kid, _very_ loyal to you." Spirit made a face, opened his mouth to make what Soul assumed was going to be some kind of teasing comment about puppy love, and Marie elbowed him into silence without missing a beat. "Let's get him out here and see what he can do, then. Kid already told me that he'd like someone to help him with the comm taps. He's going to have his hands understandably full with the vault systems."

"Absolutely," Harvar said. "Ox and I can handle the topside security system taps."

"I can help go through some of that data, too," Kilik volunteered around a mouthful of dumplings, using his chopsticks to push his glasses back up his nose. "At least until you need me to go convince a supercar that it's in Alaska or that its engine is actually a two cylinder or something."

"Right," Azusa said, nodding, pleased - right up until the moment that Black Star swallowed his eggroll and said " _Yo,_ " loudly enough that everyone turned to look at him.

He scoffed at the multiple 'how dare you interrupt while grownups are talking' looks he was receiving. "I just wanna reiterate here that Medusa is a problem, all right? I can already tell you after like three days of keeping an eye on her casinos that this isn't going to be the simple job that Miss Marie was hoping for. She is seriously _feeding people to crocodiles_. The guys she has guarding her shit aren't your run of the mill muscle, they're _fuckin' scary_. Any of this getting through to you?"

"Black Star," Marie said, with a gentle, understanding smile, and Soul blinked in surprise when his friend stood up with an annoyed sigh.

"With all due respect, Miss M," he said, dredging up diplomacy and calm from the depths of his loud, insane soul, "you tagged me into this to help gather intel personally. Not to do hacking or wire taps, but to watch people and report back on what I see. What I see implies that we are getting into something a lot scarier than just pissing off a crooked casino owner who will find and ruin us if she can ID us."

"About that," Kid said, loudly enough to run over top of Spirit saying "We know about the drugs," which had everyone in the room staring in surprise at one or the other of them in an instant. They blinked at each other for a few seconds, one of Kid's dark brows quirking upwards before Spirit shrugged and gestured for him to speak.

"So," Kid began again, and Marie got up and stood beside Azusa, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and giving him a look like she'd caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. "You know about the drugs."

"We were about to _tell_ you this," Marie said before Azusa could get confrontational. She had, Soul knew from experience, never appreciated being interrupted.

"About _what_ ," Kid said, on edge, pale eyes very, very cold. "The fact that Medusa owns half the city on account of the drug deals she has going on and the attendant political corruption she's created, or about the fact that her sister Arachne is in the process of _taking over and consolidating a bunch of cartels?_ Do you know what _happens_ when you antagonize cartels?"

The room went suddenly _very_ still, Tsubaki gaping with a forkful of Star's noodles halfway to her mouth, Kilik blinking in obvious and uncharacteristic shock, Wes looking like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head -

Azusa took a step forward, eyes slitted, in a motion Soul recognized: it was the way she moved when she was about to go for her pistol, and he lowered his chin into his chest, scowling, almost muttering 'snitches get stitches' under his breath in Marie's lilting singsong before stopping himself. Kid recognized her intent, too - he'd grown up in her precise shadow as well, learned to field-strip a gun in the dark and blindfolded under her sharp stare - but he didn't flinch, just leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, waiting.

" _Azusa_ ," Marie said, trying and failing to catch her arm - but it was Sid who grabbed her, Sid who'd been stationed so unobtrusively by the door that Soul hadn't even noticed him until he put his broad frame between her assassin's reflexes and Kid.

"I wasn't going to _shoot him_ ," Azusa snapped, elbowing the much larger man out of the way. "But I need to know how he has that information, given what we've been going through to piece it together."

"You didn't know?" Kid queried, the tilt of his head quizzical. "I was afraid of that."

"We knew," Azusa replied, voice clipped. "But what we also know is that Medusa and her dear sister are not exactly on the greatest of terms. Their current alliance is definitely one of convenience, at least as far as Medusa is concerned, and Arachne knows it."

"Marie," Spirit said before Kid could put words to his dubious expression, fingers drumming on the table, expression far from his usual facade of charming confidence so that for once he looked like the competent adult Soul suspected he might be, "I still don't like this, what if - "

"I'm not letting the _cartels_ have my husband," Marie interrupted, and in that moment there was no trace of the mother figure Soul had grown up loving.

That was when Kid stood up, hands automatically at the collar of his t-shirt despite there being nothing to adjust, and Soul noticed then the death's-head rings he wore on either hand - rings he couldn't remember his friend ever having before, not even during their road trip of enforced space-sharing. "I'm not saying you should give this up, _Mom_ ," he said, mouth twisting into a wry smile. "But you're going to need backup. My father is amenable to coming out here to speak with you on the matter. He thinks, of course," he added when Azusa took another surprised step towards him, "that this means that you want to work with him to bring down a serious threat, and maybe you do. I just assumed you'd help him out to get backup and make sure that Medusa wasn't in a position to retaliate. It's none of his business what we do with the money, right? Especially if he doesn't realize we've done _anything_ with it until after the fact."

"My son," Marie said, beaming, chest swelling with pride in a way that was beginning to strain the seams of her shirt when Spirit slapped a pleased hand down on the table and _ruined the moment_ by saying, "See, I _knew_ he'd say that, and you kept insisting we couldn't factor that into the plan - "

"Shut up," Wes said from his seat beside him, whapping him lightly on the back of the head. That jarred Spirit into silence for all of about two seconds before he rounded on his attacker, growling about respecting one's elders.

That, apparently, was the cue for _everyone to have a total meltdown_. Star started yelling loudly and repeatedly that Marie better explain what the fuck Kid was on about while Kilik tried to reach across the table to shut him up, Tsubaki discreetly digging fingers into his ribs to achieve the same; Harvar made an attempt to grab and corner Kid, who caught his wrist in a grip designed to discourage with an irritated cast to his face; Azusa grabbed Spirit and Wes by the scruffs of their respective necks and literally _shook_ them. Meanwhile, Soul saw Sid press one massive hand to his face in total exasperation for a moment before shifting into swift motion; Soul grabbed his drink just before the man slammed one massive, tattooed arm down on the table so hard that Soul was worried he might break the poor cheap thing.

Most of the drinks on the table tipped over, and as everyone else stopped trying to murder each other and started frantically attempting to mop up spilled soda, Maka spoke into the abrupt silence.

"Are you seriously trying to tell me that none of you ever realized that Kid is Shinigami's son?"

Kid's head whipped around so he could stare at her, but the intimidation factor of said stare was reduced to near zero by the fact that he was shuffling frantically to keep Coke from dripping on his shoes. "Are you telling me you _did?_ "

"Well, I wouldn't really be very good at my job if I _didn't_ pick up on these things," Maka said, rolling her shoulders a bit uncomfortably when everyone managed to stare at her and Kid while simultaneously scrambling to save the food from the spilled drinks. "No need to kill me, I never told anyone."

"I'd know if you had," Kid said, voice edged a bit, eyes flicking over everyone in the room. "I'm going to trust you all with this, but if you speak of this to _anyone_ else without my consent, I can't - "

"No one here is enough of a scrub to tell your secrets, bro," Black Star interrupted. "Are we talking about Shinigami, also known as He-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Named, the guy who's probably in charge of every governmental investigative agency that we know exists and probably as many that we don't?"

"The guy who goes around in a _skull mask_ so his enemies can never identify him?" Kilik asked, procuring a roll of paper towels from who knew where that Soul nonetheless accepted gratefully.

"I heard he's immortal," Tsubaki said, handing Black Star a huge pile of sodden napkins.

Harvar was nodding beside her. "I heard he doesn't leave _fingerprints._ "

Star threw the napkins across the room in a dripping arc, where they landed perfectly in the trash can - but not before nearly hitting Wes in the face. After a brief check to make sure that no further projectiles were incoming, Wes said, " _I_ heard that he knows the answer to _every single one_ of Fox Mulder's questions."

Soul stared into his drink and, in that moment, wished: that there was rum in his Coke, that he was in the WRX headed out of town, that Maka would stop giving him the murderous side-eye, that things could just be _simple._

"Kids," Marie said just as Black Star opened his mouth, in a tone that included everyone in the room and had the merciful effect of making everyone shut up and remember to respect others' personal space. She waited while Kilik let go of Star and sat back down, while Harvar backed off of Kid with his hands raised in supplication, while Azusa reluctantly surrendered her sidearm to Sid with an eyeroll, and at last spoke.

"I had every intention of contacting your dear father, Kid," she said, giving him a warm smile that eased some of the whiplash tension in his shoulders, softened the tightness lurking around his eyes and the set of his mouth and made him stop eyeing Harvar as if deciding which bones to break first. "After all, he visited me while I was locked up, trying to entice me into helping him with _exactly_ this. At the time, he was offering me early release and some generous parole terms if I promised to work for him once I was out, but you all should know by now that I'm not about to owe the likes of him any favors."

"Which is _wise_ ," Kid said on an exhale, eyes half-closed, clearly doing calculus in his head or whatever it was he did these days to calm his frantic mind.

"No fucking kidding," Spirit muttered, earning him a raised eyebrow from Wes, who was currently perilously close to sulking, arms crossed over his chest, chair tipped back, mouth in an almost pouting line.

" _Anyway,_ " Marie continued, "I want to get a good stock of information over, say, the next week, at which point I will get in touch with dear Lord Death and offer him my assistance in return for certain favors and dispensations. I had some inkling of just what Medusa was into before I even left prison, the clink being what it is, but now I'm certain that we're going to need his help - to say nothing of the fact that she needs to be stopped, and not just because she's a homewrecker."

Maka and Azusa _both_ started to say something, and were cut off by a sharp gesture from Marie. "Not that I am placing the blame only on her shoulders," she added, the light gleaming off her gold-embossed eyepatch in a way that mirrored the less-than-amused glint in her good eye. "But I am definitely blaming her for taking advantage of my husband's - _unique_ mental workings."

"Fair," Maka said, settling back into her chair and resuming her interrupted meal.

"The man I was before you got framed would have never forgiven him," Sid intoned, tucking Azusa's gun against the small of his back while she rolled her eyes at the room in general. "But the man I am now understands forgiveness, and that sometimes we all make bad choices. Have you spoken with him?"

"Not yet," Marie said. "I've been weighing my options. Harvar, if you don't mind terribly, please go call your friend while everyone finishes eating. Once you're back we can begin."

"Sure," he replied, and went; Marie went to the room's whiteboard, grabbed a marker, and started filling it with neat script.

"As you report, we're going to put everything we know on this board," she said, and Soul reached for the crab puffs with a resigned sigh, figuring he might as well enjoy them while he still could. "And over _here_ ," she continued, switching over to the far side of the board for a moment, "is what we're trying to achieve. By the end of the week, I expect us to have finalized who we need to pull this job off, and once they get here we can set up the master plan. Kid, start us off."

Soul listened to Kid describe the vault he'd designed - he'd even come prepared with floorplans and a list of modifications that Medusa had made on her own after the fact that Soul didn't even _want_ to know how he'd obtained - and sank progressively lower in his chair, stuffing crab puffs into his face while he resigned himself to the fact that his insane family was, unsurprisingly, going to be the death of him sooner rather than later.

They filled up the board before Soul managed to finish off the crab puffs. Sid brought in another, and Kid immediately covered it in eerily precise drawings and timelines of how, in his estimation, the plan would have to proceed. Before he could start in on the other side, Marie stopped him, having flipped through his blueprints and conferred with Black Star and read the accumulated notes on the main board.

"The food's gone and we've put together a lot of information, so let's call it quits for today," she said, giving Soul an amused look. For his part, he was giving Kid and his technical drawings the most glassy-eyed stare of his life, because the man talked fast and drew fast and had apparently already set up a functional plan in his head before even having all the information he should have needed to do so. "I think we've established that this is a doable job, but we definitely need more people and more time to plan it out. We'll only get one chance, after all."

"One chance," Spirit echoed, feet on the table and a mostly-empty box of Chinese donuts in his lap. "You say it like we'll survive if Medusa catches us."

"Please do not become old and crotchety before your time," Wes said, eyeroll apparent in his tone without requiring Soul even glance his way, and Spirit made a deeply annoyed 'hmmmmph' sound that made Maka glower preemptively.

"Spirit, please," Azusa said, cutting into the conversation before it could escalate. "Don't pretend that you think it's an unreasonable amount of danger, I _know_ what you've spent your _entire life_ doing for a living. If you're concerned about your daughter, just _say so_."

Although, Soul reflected as he flinched sympathetically at the killing glare Maka turned on her father, Azusa _might_ have just been trying to avoid one fight so she could start another.

They were, mercifully, interrupted by Tsubaki clearing her throat. "Miss Marie? Have we made sleeping arrangements? It's getting late and if we're going to be finding hotel rooms, we need to go ahead and do that since I checked out of my work hotel room this morning and that leaves us all without a place to stay."

"No hotels," Kid and Azusa said in terrifying unison, then gave each other speculative stares.

"O-kay," Tsubaki said after a brief pause to make sure that chaos wasn't going to break loose again. "So where are we all sleeping, then?"

"There are apartments upstairs," Spirit said with a negligent wave of one hand that made Soul's blood pressure spike.

"There are _occupied apartments_ upstairs," he snapped, and saw Black Star put an arm around Tsubaki's shoulders out of the corner of his eye, leaning close to say something that was no doubt _grossly inappropriate_ in her ear.

"I'll be staying in Blair's extra bedroom," Marie said. "Azusa and Sid have their own places, so the rest of you will have to sort yourselves out." She gave them all her most sunny smile. "Should that prove _problematic_ , rest assured that I will take it upon myself to see that things are arranged to _my_ liking."

The silence that followed was as horrified as it was profound, at least in the few seconds that elapsed before Black Star, at typical megaphone volume, said, "We pick Maka and Tsubaki," and the last crumbling vestiges of Soul's will to live went up in smoke.

Spirit's feet hit the floor with what at the time seemed a thunderous - and outraged - crash, but Maka beat him to the punch by saying, " _Excuse_ you," in tones that made Soul's skin go up in goosebumps.

"What," Star drawled, favoring her and Spirit both with his best grin, "did you _want_ to bunk with big daddy over there?"

Spirit looked stricken when Maka's mouth snapped shut and she made no further objection than fixing Soul with a glare like death.

"Guess Harvar and I are with Spirit and Wes, then," Kilik said philosophically, though Harvar looked less than pleased, even behind his omnipresent sunglasses. Soul was, honestly, impressed at how well they took that bit of news, given the way Spirit lived his life and, really, _everything about_ his brother.

"I'm sleeping downstairs," Kid announced, back to the room as he took pictures of the various whiteboards. "I'll set up a cot."

"There _is_ no downstairs," Soul said, and only then noticed the studiously nonchalant look Spirit was giving the wall while Wes gave him a stare that translated to something like resigned betrayal.

Azusa cleared her throat. "There's a server room downstairs," she said. "We added it when the club was rebuilt. It's going to be our base of operations for the duration. How Kid knew about it is a matter that I will have to investigate."

"He knows when he's near his own kind," Soul said from where he'd buried his face in his hands for what felt like the millionth time in the past hour. Not that it helped: Maka's glower still felt like fire on his skin and he was still anticipating his death at her hands, but at least he couldn't _see_ her this way. "Just tell him and the rest of us where the entrance is and let him set up his cot, it'll be easier."

"There's a condom vending machine in the bathrooms," Azusa said, clearly reluctant to even speak such words aloud.

" _Everything makes sense now,_ " Black Star shrieked, on his feet in a flash while everyone in the room flinched away from the sheer volume he was producing. " _That's_ why you have those fucking _vibrating Hello Kitty_ _condoms_ in there, _isn't it._ "

Spirit sighed heavily, pressing long fingers to his temples, and before Azusa could collect herself said, "Kid, I'll show you how to get in. Everyone else, we'll get to you. I can't be conducting _field trips_ into the damn bathrooms, all right? Go get your stuff moved upstairs or something."

There was a chorus of dutiful assent, and everyone got up, crowding towards the door. Soul didn't object when Black Star threw his arms over Maka and Tsubaki's shoulders, steering them towards the exit so he could help carry their things upstairs with the clear intention of making Soul do all the emergency cleaning. He just turned the other way, headed up the back stairs, and stood with his head pressed to his apartment door for a minute. His overwhelming urge was to lay down on the floor and give up because the place was a _wreck_ , which was to be expected of anywhere that Black Star lived, and there was no hope of getting it habitable quickly. Unfortunately, the alternative was being judged harshly and repeatedly by Maka _and_ Tsubaki, which put him between, he supposed, the proverbial rock and its accompanying hard place.

He unlocked the door, not bothering to remove his forehead from its dark wood until he'd fished his keys out of his pocket and slotted them into the lock. He'd start with the living room, disinfect it and clear out all the debris of two unattached young men living together so that at least Maka and Tsubaki would have someplace to sit while everything else was made habitable. Then the single bathroom, because between the two of them there was so much product all over the place that it was hard to find the countertops sometimes and Star had managed to dye the tub and sink a permanent shade of off-sky blue with hair dye, to say nothing of the general state of the place.

Well. Nothing was going to distract from the fact that their shower curtain was a stunning depiction of grumpy cat as Ariel from _The Little Mermaid_ , but Soul had every intention of blaming _that_ on Black Star, considering he'd really had nothing to do with it being there and the fact that it made him laugh on a daily basis wasn't relevant.

He marshaled his strength, stepped through his door, and came to a full, shock-induced stop on the threshold.

When Black Star, Maka, and Tsubaki came in, Soul was still gaping in mute disbelief, though he'd managed to sit down on the couch at least. It was just - the place was _clean_ , spotless even, spotless some _how_ , some _way_ that Soul assumed involved black magic or a deity.

This, of course, was _painfully hilarious_ to Black Star, who started cackling as soon as he caught sight of Soul's face, struck a pose that showed off his biceps to their best advantage, and said, "Sneak up and hit'cha like a _fuckin tornado_."

Behind him, Maka cracked a smile, despite her apparent efforts not to, and Tsubaki indulged in an extremely unladylike snicker.

Soul was preparing a witty comeback when the vase on the coffee table started beeping.

There was a sort of breathless moment in which Soul dropped his head into his hands, Black Star sprang at roughly the speed of light to the defense of his gizmos, and Tsubaki, utter bewilderment apparent in her tone, asked, "Is that a tree full of _Tamagotchis?_ "

" _Yes_ ," Soul replied, giving Black Star a baleful stare as he checked every one of what had to be a few dozen virtual pets hailing from the 1990's.

"Excuse you, this is _art_ is what this is," Star said, gesturing to the entirety of his creation: a large decorative glass vase, filled to the brim with _pogs_ , into which he'd jammed what Soul assumed was a decorative branch of some sort, hung all over with keychain e-pets. "By the way, Soul, Kilik stole the only air mattress that doesn't leak, so unless you wanna bunk with me you're sleeping out here."

"You _gave them my bed?"_

Star finally located the beeping scourge, thumbs flying across decades-old buttons and not even looking Soul in the eye as he signed his death warrant. "Think about the options here, champ. I think you'll find that my flawless reasoning has already found the best solution."

They weren't good, Soul had to admit: without an air mattress, there were only three places to sleep that weren't the floor - his bed, Star's bed, and the couch. Soul wasn't about to consign _anyone_ to sharing a bed with Black Star, and he _sure as hell_ wasn't going to invite doom by bunking with one of the ladies, and so -

"Yeah, fine, I'll sleep on the couch," he said, sighing. "Just give me a minute to clean up my room."


	2. Take that, and rewind it back

Soul slept on the couch that night, and all the rest of the week when he didn't end up trying to sleep _in his_ _car_ because Black Star had insisted that they do cheesy buddy cop movie stakeout surveillance. Their couch was a useless farce of a piece of furniture, though, so saying that he _slept_ might have been romanticizing things a bit, especially given the goddamn _beeping Tamagotchi tree that Black Star refused to relocate_. Still, Tsubaki made up for the fact that she got up at dawn by making him breakfast, and being up that early gave him the opportunity to get a shower and flee his apartment before Maka and Star got up and everyone caused a traffic jam in the bathroom.

Belatedly he realized that she might have been looking out for him, if it were possible to have someone's best interests at heart while feeding them sriracha-laced omelettes. To be honest, Soul hadn't even known they _had_ sriracha in the apartment - and they might not have, realistically. Tsubaki was the type to unobtrusively expand a friend's pantry contents without even mentioning it, to silently improve a friend's quality of life with no more than a smile and a negligent shrug.

He realized this late in the week, though, standing in the hallway at seven thirty in the morning with Maka glaring fiery death at him, her hair mussed from sleep and a wild, caffeine-deprived look in her eyes.

Black Star ruined the moment by sidling past them, humming _Maneater_ under his breath; Soul took that as just about the subtlest hint Star was capable of giving and relinquished the bathroom without even starting the fight Maka was apparently looking for. Still, it'd been a week of little to no quality sleep and doing his level best to avoid a woman he was supposed to be working closely with, so Soul packed up his frayed nerves and his exhaustion and his bathroom kit - set aside for Black Star's more elaborate hair days - and headed downstairs to brave the club's showers.

In theory, anyway. The reality was that he sat down on the shower's built-in seat with the intention of warming up a bit and woke up propped in the corner who knew how long afterwards, waterlogged and confused as to why Kid of all people was saying his name in increasingly louder and more concerned tones.

" _Soul_ ," Kid said, resorting to giving the shower door a solid _thwack_ , "I'm trying to do you a _favor_ here. _Wake up._ If you don't, I swear I'm going to let Blair in here and _no one is going to be happy about that but her_." There was a sigh, audible even through the door, and Soul couldn't help but grin as stood up. He could _hear_ Kid pinching the bridge of his nose. " _Especially_ not me, Soul. I do _not_ need that in my life, particularly not before lunch."

"Yeah," he said, fumbling for his shampoo, not completely awake still. "Yeah, I got it, I'm up, give me a second to actually wash my hair. _Please_ don't let Blair in - actually, how did _you_ get in, I locked the door."

"I wouldn't be so tactless as to pick the lock, if that's what you're getting at," Kid said, the amused drawl in his voice audible even over the shower and Soul scrubbing at his recalcitrant hair. "That's Tsubaki's job, anyway. Did you miss the memo about the server room downstairs? This is where the entrance is, over by the clothes hooks."

Soul rinsed suds out of his hair and fumbled for his body wash. "No, I _got the memo_ , I just haven't really been sleeping." And just as with sleeping, it'd been _days_ since he'd been able to properly take care of his face, and, likewise, it was a minor miracle that there'd been no breakouts so far. "So what brings you here on such a beneficent mission? Takes a true friend to save a guy from over-affectionate strippers first thing in the morning."

"We're almost ready to get started - or rather, your piece of this mission is almost ready to begin, now that Nygus is here and the race is soon," Kid said, thoughtfully slinging a clean towel over the shower door when Soul shut off the water. "I volunteered to brief you."

"Fantastic," Soul said. "I'm gonna need some of those energy drinks you live off of if you want me to be able to understand more than every third word you try to say to me."

"It's cool, I got you," Kid said, giving him a nod when he stepped out of the shower, towel round his hips, and politely turned his back so Soul could get clean clothes on. "Head down there, I'll be right behind you. Take your stuff, it's fine."

Soul was too worn the fuck out to even bother questioning what was merely the latest in a series of mind-bendingly weird events in his life, including but not limited to Maka's apparent and completely unironic love of their abomination of a shower curtain. The door was, as it turned out, not _near_ the clothes hooks but actually built into the wall they were mounted on, and Soul didn't get much further than that before Kid caught up to him.

"Just wipe your shoes clean, it's fine," he said, giving Soul an amused eyebrow lift when he realized that his friend had stepped through the secret door, found himself on a welcome mat, and stopped in confusion. "Let's get moving before Blair comes in and starts asking questions and we have to kill her to protect our secrets or something."

"I thought Blair was our in with your dad because why _wouldn't_ a stripper of her caliber be an undercover agent," Soul said, letting himself be herded down narrow steps by Kid for the second time in under two weeks because he was still compelled to roll his eyes every time Blair's involvement with a man known as Lord Death came up. "She was certainly quick to point out that Giriko might be willing to betray Medusa."

"That doesn't mean that Blair gets to know all of Miss Marie's secrets," Kid said as though that should have been obvious, and, well, okay.

"You have a point," Soul said, blinking a bit owlishly at the room they emerged into, which was both larger and more claustrophobic than he'd expected. There were multiple tables, all strewn with papers, and the walls were largely occupied by devices he really didn't know the proper names for, especially given his current barely-coherent state. Mostly what he saw was an inordinate number of flashing lights and about five hundred monitors and the kind of information overload that would have made _Maka's_ head spin. "So what's the plan, anyway?"

"You're gonna take a nap," Kid said, already settling himself back at the room's main table, where he'd hooked a laptop up to two extra monitors and had seemingly arranged all of his pens by color and ink level. "Go on. Bed's behind those folding screens. I'm given to understand that the situation in your apartment and the general state of things between you and Maka has more than taken its toll this week, to say nothing of the amount of work we've all been doing and your - _information gathering expeditions_ with Black Star. You deserve some uninterrupted sleep, which is something I can give you right now."

"Uh," Soul said, belatedly noticing the series of tasteful Japanese folding screens that had been set up in the far corner, underneath a ceiling-mounted display that was filled top to bottom with text. "Yeah, okay." He picked his way across the room, dodging chairs and making sure not to even breathe too hard on the electronics, and cocked his head in puzzlement once he reached his destination.

"No," Kid said before Soul could even open his mouth. "You may not use my bed. _Think_ , Soul. You get the nest. Mind my plant, it's behind that."

"Right," Soul said, and found that there was, indeed, what appeared to be an oversized bean bag chair behind the voluminous fern-thing that Kid had procured from who knew where. It wasn't a bean bag chair, though, which he found out when he sat down on it; it was stuffed with - fluff, he guessed. The kind of stuff in futons, maybe. That didn't matter, though. What mattered was that it was comfortable, covered in soft blankets, and safe from most of the craziness that dominated his life, at least for a little while.

He said "Thanks," Kid said "Go to sleep," and Soul drifted off to the sound of whirring computers and Kid's pen scratching across paper at warp factor maximum.

He woke up when Kid unceremoniously dropped something heavy on his stomach, something that turned out to be a cheap folder filled near to bursting. His incoherent and slightly winded query earned him an amused huff.

"That is The Plan," Kid said in response, the capital letters prominent. "Get up, and I'll get you coffee - or would you prefer tea? - and we can talk about it."

"Talk about it?" Soul asked, following Kid back into the main area of the room and greeting Kilik with a fistbump that Harvar and Ox politely declined, though they returned his sleepy nod of greeting before returning to the seemingly endless reams of data that they'd collected over the course of the week. "Is there something about The Plan that you think I'm going to need to be persuaded into?"

"Well, no," Kid said, leading him to the table he'd been working at earlier. "I know that you aren't going to flat out refuse a plan that we've put together with Marie's approval. We might be her kids, but we're all professionals, after all, a fact that I have been reminding _myself_ of for days now." He sat down, collected the French press he'd apparently set up before he went to prod Soul awake, and poured him a fresh, steaming cup of coffee in a mug that, in Soul's estimation, featured enough mathematical equations to build a spaceship.

"Well," he said, accepting Kid's offer of creamer, "this is already much more civilized than my apartment, barring the thirty minutes every morning when Tsubaki makes us breakfast before everyone else gets up."

"We all have different ways of affecting sanity," Kid said, mouth pulling into something affectionate for a moment, and then he took a swig of coffee and sighed. "Listen, you and Maka are going to be working together - working _closely_ ," he amended when Soul started to dismiss his concern. "She's got a key role to play, and you're going to be backing her up - and you two _need_ to be on speaking terms."

"We can work together," Soul said, spine straightening, face settling into something carefully neutral that was a quiet warning he hoped Kid would heed. He wasn't going to talk about it mostly because there wasn't anything to talk about that everyone else didn't already know. It was obvious that they all thought something more had happened, but the reality was just - _so_ dumb, really. "Like you said, we're professionals here. I just hope you don't need me to pull off _too_ elaborate of an acting job, I'm a driver first and foremost, you know."

Kid gave him a Look. "As your better half is so fond of saying, sticking feathers up my ass does not make me a chicken," he said, "but if you want to live in some form of denial, so be it. You have a gods-granted poker face and you've had a lot of practice at keeping your cool under pressure, and that's what you're going to need for this."

"Okay," Soul said, taking a long, bracing swallow of coffee better than anything that had ever graced his apartment, "lay it on me. What is _this?_ "

That was when Harvar interrupted by dropping into one of the table's other chairs, sunglasses in place as always but not detracting in the least from his absolutely _hatefully_ self-satisfied grin as he said, "You and me get to be Maka's bodyguards."

 

* * *

 

Given a choice, Soul would have rather _flung himself into the sun_ than be where he ended up, which was sleeping in one of Medusa's casino's penthouse suites pretending to be the bored bodyguard of an arms dealer's spoiled rotten daughter. The damn room was - well, to go by the brochure, it was about ten times the size of his apartment, had a private elevator, a pool table, _multiple_ hot tubs, a rainforest's worth of exotic wood and plants, and, because whoever had made the reservations was feeling spiteful, a _grand piano_. As _decor_. The whole thing offended Soul down to his very core, and he wondered if Black Star had been the one to pick the room.

Granted, Maka played her part to the hilt and put on a really impressive virtuoso performance, but Soul was convinced she was loving every minute of it. Not just because it meant she got to go out and have expensive spa days and go shopping, either, but because it meant she got to be an utter asshole to Soul every minute of every day. Still - it was not, he supposed, _completely_ horrid: the penthouse was excessively swanky, it got him away from the madhouse that was his apartment, he'd been given a really snappy suit and pair of sunglasses that he got to wear _indoors at night_ , and he actually got to catch up on his sleep in a _really expensive bed_.

Well. He got to catch up on his sleep when Harvar wasn't hiding his phone and cranking the ringer volume up so Black Star could text him inane bullshit like _If you'll be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal._ The final straw was when _someone_ set his ringtone to _I Will Always Love You_ and he had to spend half an hour listening to Whitney Houston belt string after string of overwrought vowels while he searched for it.

"How do you have this much free time," he asked Harvar halfway through the week that Maka was to spend in the hotel leading up to the actual heist, buttering up Medusa and securing for them an 'in' that they could exploit, hopefully to extreme monetary gain. It turned out that Medusa was, in fact, interested in securing a discreet supply of very illegal guns, which was interesting on multiple levels - most of which had Kid's father champing at the bit and ready to give Marie more help than she could have possibly put to use.

Harvar just grinned and shushed him, settling his face into the classic tough guy aesthetic as they stepped out of the hotel room to escort Maka to a lunch with Medusa that was probably going to cost more than Soul's car.

Well, not the WRX, the pricetag on that thing was not to be speculated upon at this juncture. Soul had, with that thought, been referring to the old Honda CRX he drove to work, which looked like it might fall apart at any moment but - well, appearances weren't everything. Still, he'd picked it up on the cheap, to be sure.

For a _car_. For lunch, the mind boggled.

The week passed thus: they escorted Maka, singly or as a pair, everywhere she went. Harvar and Ox had rigged their tough guy sunglasses with transmitters, microphones, the works - Ox specifically had done some really diabolical things, and by the time he was done soldering and tinkering he had, he claimed, created something that Google would have wet itself over, had it known such a thing existed. What Soul knew was that he had become a walking wiretap of sorts, piggybacked into every network he got within spitting distance of. The wire he wore in his ear was perfectly capable of functioning normally, and often did, but just as often Soul was fiddling with it, swapping bands until he could listen to police chatter or Medusa's casino security whining about the old lady monopolizing the penny slots.

A more morally upright man than Ox might have made his fortune on such a thing, but they had all agreed long ago that making a living off of good honest work was no fun _at all_.

Neither, as Marie herself had proved at the beginning of the week while Maka was checking in with all the self-centered uproar she could create, was following the plan to the letter. They had all done what they'd been supposed to, and Marie had used that moment of distraction on Medusa's part to sneak into the restaurant where she was supposed to be having dinner with Stein and, bolder than Black Star when he was sauced up and raring to win a joust, took Medusa's chair with a winsome smile that by all reports had not faded a bit when Stein reacted like a startled cat.

It had also gotten her banned from Medusa's casinos, which kind of put a crimp in certain parts of The Plan, but Kid took it in stride - more than could be said for pretty much everyone else - and adjusted things accordingly while Spirit was still having a conniption fit. That had been a rather trying moment, actually, because Maka had continued right along, blithely unaware of the drama explosion of her father's consternation, and Soul and Harvar had been obligated to keep straight faces the _entire time_ \- even when Black Star, in the background on Kid's mic, had begun chanting the intro lines of Kesha's _Dinosaur_ , shushed in a timely fashion by Tsubaki before he got to the parts of the song that weren't relevant to their situation and would in fact have made things pretty weird.

What _did_ make things weird was that Marie came back from that meeting and sat up all night with everyone, re-drafting the plan around her unshakeable assumption that Stein was on their side somehow - or, at the least, that he wasn't _against_ them, that he wouldn't raise the alarm should he find Black Star rooting around in the casino vault. Soul sat staring at the keys of the suite's piano with a mic in his ear while Marie explained the revised plan and the backup plan and watched Harvar take notes all over their initial printed copies of The Plan while Maka paced and paced.

Maka, at least, was not then treated to an entire week of ranting from Black Star regarding an offhand comment Stein had made about Medusa's casino vault 'having more to it than you'd expect.' While all the _sane_ members of their team assumed that he'd been referring to the whole drug situation - and, admittedly, they were still trying to figure out what the supply lines for that venture were - Black Star had gone from zero to yelling about a _secret passage_ within ten minutes and then never stopped.

"Look," he said to Soul on Friday afternoon, as he and Harvar were getting ready to escort Maka downstairs to meet her 'papa' for lunch, "I ain't sayin' she's a gold digger - "

"Star, I'm going to kill you when this is over," Soul muttered to the mic at his collar, shrugging into his suit jacket. "Your share of the money can go to Tsubaki or orphans, your choice."

"Yeah, you wish you had a snowball's chance in hell of winning a fight with my magnificence," Star said, then sobered. "Seriously though, if I were masterminding the kind of thing Medusa's got going on and I had her resources, I'd _sure as hell_ be investing in secret passages. No fuss, no muss, ya dig?"

"Tell him," Maka said from where she was fussing with her hair, already resplendent in her spoiled rich girl outfit, "that he needs to stop being so mad about not figuring out the trigger for the secret room under the club on his own. He's seeing secret passages everywhere now."

Harvar glanced between them and, before Soul could respond, said, "We need to get going. Observing radio silence, we'll be downstairs in five."

 

* * *

 

Kid settled into his chair, eyes on the monitors in front of him that kept up an all-hours feed from Medusa's security cameras, and let his shoulders loosen, willing the muscles into something less than the steel-cable tightness they'd developed over the course of the past few days. Soon. He'd endured just as much of Black Star's insistent yelling that there were secret tunnels under the casino as Soul had, but where Soul was annoyed by it, dismissive, Kid was - perhaps slightly unnerved. It was possible, at the least, and Stein did not make meaningless comments - _especially_ , Kid thought, in a situation like this. It didn't help that for all the time he'd spent monitoring camera feeds, Kid still had _no idea_ where Stein spent the bulk of his time.

It wasn't important, he supposed. Marie believed in Stein and had planned around him assisting, however much that might make Kid nearly as twitchy as the part of the plan that involved _Giriko_ , and they had a job to do. Spirit was currently at the casino with Wes for a date: he'd been intercepted as planned by Medusa herself when he picked up his daughter for an elaborate lunch and had accepted her request to share their meal, all to plan. Nygus was with him, being the actual, legitimate bodyguard that Soul and Harvar were pretending to be but weren't, not really. Medusa had taken Spirit's bait hook, line, and sinker, and had obligingly set up her would-be business partner with a dinner date with Mosquito under the pretense of discussing a potential purchase of a very expensive sports car for Wes, who was currently playing the part of Spirit's very young, very spoiled boytoy. Mosquito had been confirmed by Shinigami himself to be Arachne's man, sent to Las Vegas to keep both eyes very carefully on her ambitious younger sister, and they needed him well out of the picture when things began to go wrong.

Kid remembered that conversation with very little fondness. "So you're going to lie to Medusa to get her to introduce you to Arachne's main agent, whom you're _also going to lie to and maybe rob as a distraction_ in order to get him and his goons away from the casino at the opportune moment for us to crack the vault?"

No one else had seemed to see the inherent levels of _extreme danger_ there, so Kid had subsided without too much arguing. In for a penny, in for a pound, one supposed, even when that ultimately meant risking having pretty much every criminal of consequence out for one's skin. Kid reminded himself for the hundredth time that mission success meant that none of those criminals would know who they were or that they were still alive, and considered taking the time for some last-minute meditation or maybe one of the club's specialty drinks, complete with paper umbrella.

He also deliberately didn't think too much about the role that Kim and Jackie were playing in this production. Harvar had brought in Ox, and together they had championed bringing the two ladies on board, a magician and her pyrotechnics-obsessed assistant. At least Jackie was also a very passable getaway driver, but Kim - well. Her expressly stated job had been to hypnotize certain key casino employees so that, when presented with a particular code word, they would become passive amnesiacs, willing and eager to help. Kid had pulled all of the week's employee schedules and off Kim had gone, Jackie in tow, grinning like mad while he tried not to give his doubts too much time to set in. Kim had, admittedly, demonstrated her talents for them and Kid couldn't refute what he'd seen, but it was still a bit difficult to set all of his trust on such a touchy-feely metaphysical lynchpin. Perhaps _especially_ given what the keywords had ended up being -

 _"Medusa's heading out,"_ said Blair's tinny voice, echoed in weird stereo over the room's speakers and in Kid's earpiece. That meant it was five o'clock already. Kid took a deep breath, held it, forced his mind blank, listened to the deliberate thud of his heart.

Azusa and Ox were monitoring the comm feeds, and though it made Kid nervous not to be the one orchestrating everything directly, there was nothing to be done for it. There was no accessing that vault without him being there in the flesh, not unless Medusa had a change of heart and unlocked the doors herself.

One of the monitors in front of him went to static, and Kid nodded to himself, stood and turned to find Kilik heading towards him, dark skin very stark against the white of his worn t-shirt.

"Time to get ready," his old friend said, and Kid felt a tired smile pull at his face. It'd been a long time since he'd seen any of them - far too long, no matter how he deluded himself into thinking that he didn't really need them. One could only live alone in an underground code den for so long. He'd have to thank Soul for coming after him if they all survived this.

"Way ahead of you," Kid replied, grin going crooked, and Kilik laughed, bumped fists with him, and waited while he gathered up his clothes and supplies before turning to follow him back up the stairs. "Did you already tag Black Star and Tsubaki in?"

"Tsu's doing yoga up in the apartment," Kilik said, hands in his jeans pockets, leather and chrome bracelets jangling around his wrists with his shrug and easy, stair-skipping gait. "I think Star is saying goodbye to Blair's boobs or something, maybe trying to get her to bring him back some kind of merch from the monster truck rally."

Kid rolled his eyes, but out of affection more than anything else. "He always did have a weakness for ridiculous trucks and massive monstrous stripper boobs," he said, and meant it, because Blair was one of the most ridiculously endowed women he had ever seen, even in all his years of internet use. Whether or not that had been a factor in his father's recruitment of her might never be known, though Kid personally doubted it. An agent of Blair's skill was chosen on merit, and her cover adapted to her - _attributes_ \- as necessary. If Kid recalled correctly, the stripper gig had been her idea, but his contact with his father was, generously speaking, sporadic, so he didn't really _know_. He'd avoided talking to Blair too much as well, since he knew she'd report on everything he did.

That was irrelevant at present, though. Kid made his way up to the club's main level, whereupon Kilik left to go collect Black Star, and headed into the men's dressing room. It was empty this early in the day, and Kid changed out of his more mundane clothing and into his good, tailored suit, smoothing lapels and doing his cufflinks, knotting his tie with meticulous care and rolling his shoulders, testing the fabric's give. It was just as well-made as he remembered it, which was good, because he had a feeling he was going to need the flexibility in the end.

 _And_ the extra pockets. He rolled his eyes only a little as he fished out a handful of devices made out of neon plastic and tucked them into an inner pocket of his jacket for later use. Someone had pointed out that they needed a unique trigger for Kim's hypnotism trick, and someone else had mentioned Black Star, and five seconds later the man himself had had the bad taste to dump an _entire case_ of annoyance devices circa 1995 onto the table, his collection of 'vintage memes' recorded onto them in a million six second bits, up to and including the entire godforsaken Numa Numa song. _How_ , Kid had wondered, had almost asked out loud, how the _hell_ did Soul manage to cohabitate with someone on Black Star's level without everything ending in wholesale murder?

Truly a mystery for the ages. He decided to forget that the cursed Yakbaks even existed until he needed them in the interests of salvaging what remained of his sanity, and went to the mirror to put his hair to rights, minding the white streaks. For a long minute Kid stared at his reflection, then took a deep breath. He'd have only one chance; all of them would. If things went as planned they'd lock up a known crime lord _and_ make off with a sum of money that would make any avaricious man happy, and in Marie's ideal world Stein would rejoin them in the process. There were so many variables, though, and Marie had answered half of his concerns with a smile and exhortations of trust and he just -

"Yo, Deathson, let's hustle!"

Black Star's voice cut through _everything_ with piercing bravado, up to and including every thought Kid had ever had. Kid jumped, sighed, and turned to the door.

"Everything's on schedule?"

Star nodded, still tucking his bright hair up under a blessedly nondescript hat. "Everyone's just where we planned, so it's time to get in there and get to work. After all, they're doomed without _us_."

"All right," Kid said, grinning at his reflection rather than turn the expression on Black Star. "Let's get this show on the road, then. Time to remind my vault of its true master."

"And," Black Star added as they headed out of the club, "time to let Tsubaki show it the true meaning of romance, eh?"

Kid rolled his eyes again and declined to comment.

 

* * *

 

They'd caused a few failures in the camera system, intercepted the inevitable maintenance call when the in-house guy couldn't fix the problem, and thus it followed that Kid, with Tsubaki, Kilik, and Black Star in tow, presented himself to the guard on the staff entrance to Medusa's casino under the pretense of being there to fix things. It wasn't even far from the truth; certainly Kid _could_ have fixed the problem, even had he not been the one who'd caused it in the first place.

Azusa's voice hissed a bit over the little earpiece he was wearing. _"Camera out there's offline, keep moving."_

As if he needed the encouragement. "Which one, Star?" he asked, ignoring the guard's confusion.

"Orange," Black Star said with not a little bit of overbearingly self-satisfied amusement, and Kid fished the appropriate Yakbak out of his pocket with an expression of deepest annoyance.

"Was this _really_ necessary," he said, and pushed the playback button.

The tiny, horrible speaker blared to life, screeching _DO A BARREL ROLL_ with enough volume that it distorted.

Kid flinched.

The guard's face went blinkingly blank for a second or two, and then he shook his head and gave them a vacant grin.

"Go on in," he said, punching his code into the keypad and holding the door open for them. Kid ignored his almost endearingly helpful description of where they were supposed to be going to report to the proper authorities so that they could get to work, nodding and nodding until at long last the man finished and gestured them through.

 _"Do you need directions?"_ Azusa asked once they were in, and Kid grumbled a negative under his breath. He knew the way. Casinos were made to be dizzyingly hard for the uninitiated to navigate, made to keep people in and walk them in circles until they gave up and went back to spending money; Kid had committed the floor plans to memory days ago. _"All right. Cameras are out for now, but don't dawdle."_

They only ran into one other person along the way, a man who was quickly sent on his way by Tsubaki's smile and Kid's assurances that they were there to work on the security system, accompanied by a flash of the fake visitor employee pass he'd made. Kilik had, he remembered, been explaining to him at some length just what he was planning to do to any cars that they might find in pursuit while he'd been working on it, and also about what exactly he'd helped Ox do to the glasses he'd given out to Soul and Harvar. Kid had almost told him that if he had so much free time, he had a circuit board that needed soldering, but decided that that might be taken as some kind of proposition and held his tongue.

"Afternoon, gents," he said to the men standing guard on the vault's massive elevator, giving them a cool smile as they gave him an extremely suspicious once-over. "We're here to work on the security systems," he added, reaching into his pocket for another Yakbak.

"You're in the wrong place for that," the guard on the left said, unsmiling, and these were the real threats, complete with automatic rifles slung across their backs that Kid would have bet money had no serial numbers.

Kid gave him another chilly smile and pulled a neon green bit of plastic from his pocket, pressed the button, and -

Nothing. Spitting static and a noise like a dying modem trying to reenact the wicked witch's death scene.

Kid blinked at it, half-turned so he could look at Black Star, purveyor of all 90's devices. "Star? What's the contingency for this?"

"I appreciate the faith, Kid, really, but why would we have had a contingency, those things - "

" _Break all the time_ ," Kilik said, voice edged enough that Black Star frowned. "They're older than _you_ , Star. Why _didn't_ you suggest some kind of backup, they're so _appallingly cheap,_ hell, why didn't _I_ suggest some kind of backup _."_

The guards gave them looks that said they were pretty close to making a call that would bring the entire heist crumbling down.

"Star," Kid said, fingers going to the knot of his tie, a purely nervous habit that he wished he could shake, "whatever was supposed to be on that thing, you better belt it out _right now_."

"Uh," Black Star said, caught a bit off guard in a rare instance of not having planned for a situation in any conceivable way, "okay, uh. Tsu?"

Tsubaki, picture of poise that she tended to be, settled her toolbox in the crook of one elbow and began drumming out a beat without even a pause, without a question or even an eyeroll.

Star nodded along, put one finger over his lips when the guards started to protest or perhaps move to apprehend them, and began bobbing his head sideways, shoulders working their way into the motion as he crooned, deliberately grating to mimic as best he could the questionable at best quality of the Yakbak speakers, the opening lines to _What Is Love?_

The guards' brows furrowed in confusion, and then -

"Seriously," Kid said as their faces smoothed over. "You're for real, that's what you picked."

"I'm sure you'd have preferred the Fibonacci sequence," Black Star said, "but some of us aren't giant math nerds. Let's _go._ _Man_ that was awesome, I feel like a _wizard_."

The elevator took Kid's handprint and vocal command and opened without a fuss, allowing them entrance to something that looked like it had come from a very classy futuristic military base. Because it was Kid's master override, the security systems would ignore them: the cameras would not record, the computers would not take note of anything they did, the weight-sensitive flooring would ignore their tread, the sensors in every room would politely turn a blind eye when their respiration inevitably raised the ambient temperature and changed the makeup of the air into something one didn't find in an empty room. This was the reason it had to be him leading this team: after all, no one could have imitated his handprint, his voice, his knowledge of the system he'd designed from the ground up.

Kid spent the journey downwards with his eyes closed, back to the wall, reciting the Fibonacci sequence in his head and envisioning the golden spiral that the numbers described until the tension in his shoulders loosened, until things made sense again and he could believe that Stein was somehow waiting to help them the way Marie and Black Star insisted he was.

Yeah, that lasted about ten seconds, right up until Kilik singsonged "Baby don't hurt me" under his breath and Black Star decided they needed elevator music.

"Hey Star," Kid said, arms crossed over his chest and, hopefully, achieving maximum coolness by virtue of being in a suit and leaning against a wall like a total badass protagonist, "just so you know. If you pull out a kazoo and start playing _Careless Whisper_ , you're gonna win a first person demonstration of why I was Nygus's favorite in combat training."

"Nah bro," Star said, a _rhinestone-studded_ kazoo already in his hand, "it's been a while since we hung out, I've learned some new songs. How about _November Rain?_ "

"If you play _November Rain, I_ am going to be the one using you for combat training," Tsubaki said, earning her a lascivious eyebrow waggle from Black Star but also mercifully convincing him to put the kazoo away.

"So," Kilik said, grinning wide and mischievous as he leaned forward a bit, the metal bits at the ends of his dreadlocks clacking, "when's the - "

The elevator stopped and his mouth shut with a snap that Kid waved away, dismissive. "It's fine," he said. "We made it this far, that was honestly the hard part. The guys in the cage'll be easy."

"Says you," Tsubaki grumbled, waiting for him to walk out of the elevator. "You're not the one responsible for cracking that safe."

"Aw, you're good with your hands, Tsu," Black Star said, falling in beside her with a sunny grin that took the innuendo out of his words. "Don't see what you've got to worry about."

She sighed, following Kid down the narrow, brightly-lit hallway towards the heavy steel door that led to the cage. "This is the kind of safe where you only get one chance, you know," she said, fingers tapping on the handle of her toolbox, nervous. "If I mess up - "

That got her a _huge_ grin, the kind that made the cold of the hallway lights turn to summer sun. "If you mess up, it's _Christmas_ ," Star said, all but cackling. "We get to _blow it up_."

"And _run like hell_ ," Kilik reminded him, heavy boots thudding on the hall's heavy floor. "They're gonna notice an explosion no matter what we do, Star, do you know how hard it's gonna be to get a pile of money out of here when everyone's _freaking out?_ "

"I dunno 'bout you," Black Star said, "but I _like_ a good challenge."

"This is why you didn't get to come up with the plan," Kid said, distracted, because they'd come to the door and it was his show again. It took a little more finesse than the elevator, but only barely: so far all of his overrides were intact, which was a blessing that Kid was more than happy to accept.

Except then he strode through the door, very carefully the picture of confidence because this was _his vault_ , after all, and no one could ever tell him that he didn't have a right to be there, and the guys in the cage got to their feet very fast and very startled, leveled _automatic rifles_ at him and barked, "You're not supposed to be here," and all Kid could do was give them his best offended deity stare and sigh.

"If I wasn't _supposed to_ _be here_ ," he said in tones of deep, condescending patience, "do you really think I _would_ be here? That I somehow just waltzed through all of your security measures without anyone at any point noticing me?" He glanced over his shoulder, gave Black Star a quelling look because the man was crowding into his space, practically breathing fire at the prospect of a real fight, and turned back to the men in front of him with a sort of bored disbelief. "And apparently you also think I just somehow convinced all of your electronic security measures to ignore me as well, yes?"

"The door took his security card," said the man in the back, lowering the muzzle of his gun. "D'you think...?"

" _And_ my prints," Kid pointed out, and, now that he was sure that they weren't going to put bullets in him, walked in, the others fanning out in a cautious arc behind him. "Look, you wanna check out my credentials, come on over here and I'll show you. I'm here to work on the security system, and I've been led to believe that you guys have kind of a base level issue here that needs me to have access to the heart of it all."

"Yeah, all right," said the guy closest to Kid, and gave his partner a nod and a head motion that meant he should go check out whatever credentials Black Star and the others might have. "Let's see it."

Kid handed him the bogus access card - which was _not_ the one that had gotten him in, but who would be crazy enough to hand that thing over and rely on hypnotism to ensure its safe return - and then made a show of digging through his pockets. "I've got my wallet here somewhere, hold on."

The man looked at the card, looked at him, looked back down. Said, "This shouldn't have let you anywhere near here," and reached for his earpiece, doubtless to check in with security.

Black Star said, "Yellow," and Kid pulled the right Yakbak out of his pocket, watching the man's face slacken at its shriek of _All your base are belong to us_. From Black Star's direction came a hoarse shout of _IT'S OVER 9000_ that made Kid rub at his temples for a moment, but he could only be so exasperated about something he'd agreed to. At least it'd _worked_. The two men put their guns away, gave all four of them friendly, vacant nods, and left - headed to the end of the hallway to loiter outside the elevator doors, checking in as normal with security, keeping the coast clear.

Kid waited until they were gone before he went to the room's other exit, which allowed him through with no more fuss than the other one had. The ones after that, though, _those_ were going to be a bit more high maintenance. By the time the scanners were done with him, Black Star and Kilik had tired of peering at the room's various furnishings - okay, maybe Star had grabbed a bunch of casino chips but who really cared at this point. The important detail was that they were _right behind him_ , watching him punch in the master code and swipe his god-level ID card and let the thing take a handprint as though staring would make things happen faster.

Protip: no dice. Kid kind of wanted to apply his elbows judiciously to their solar plexuses just to make a point, but he ignored that urge. He was just tense, they were _all_ tense, and things were honestly going pretty well so far except for that incident with that idiotic Haddaway song.

"I still can't believe that hypnotism works this well," Tsubaki said, the only one not way too close to him as the door unbolted and Kid pushed it open. "It's kind of amazing."

"Truthfully it's not much more remarkable than what Spirit does when he talks people into doing whatever he wants," Kid said, eyeing the security cameras in the hall beyond the door with a certain degree of trepidation. "Though the amnesia's convenient, I admit."

 _"Cameras aren't recording,"_ Azusa said in his ear, just to make him jump, and he grumbled at her before he got moving.

"People can be nearly as suggestible as computers," Kilik added, the grin audible in his voice. Also audible was Black Star's guffaw and the sound of him punching Kilik in the shoulder in the most bromantic way imaginable.

"Not _this_ computer," Kid said, coming to a stop in front of the big master terminal that guarded the final portal before the vault itself became the main security measure. "This thing ain't suggestible for _shit._ I'd let you try to hack it just so you could see, but we don't have time for that. We'll _never_ have time for that, you could spend _lifetimes_ on it."

"Oh baby oh baby," Black Star said, leering just for the hell of it while Kid pulled the terminal's keyboard out from the wall and started tapping at it. "Gauntlet _thrown_ , dude, you gonna take that from him?"

Kilik's shrug was audible even in his voice. "I don't hack big stuff, man," he said, accompanied by a bit of rustling that resolved itself into the distinct sound of a deck of cards being shuffled. "Besides, why would you even try to pretend like something Kid designed wouldn't be outrageous, anyway?"

"No fun," Star said, whining, and then Tsubaki murmured something and he settled down with a sigh. " _Fine_ , let's play Egyptian rat screw."

Kid tuned them out. Medusa hadn't tampered with any of the previous access points, but this one wasn't having it. Or rather, it was acknowledging who he was, it had his codes and his scan info, but -

"Override: deus ex machina," he repeated, this time with deliberate, careful enunciation, and the thing _beeped_ at him, refused, would have logged something incriminating and probably sent out an emergency code if he hadn't already hobbled its ability to do so.

He wanted a drink. He wanted _tequila_. There wasn't time for this kind of nonsense, there was no reason why everything should have been intact and functional except for this _one thing_ and he didn't have time and didn't really care all that much about the _how_ or the _why_ of it. They just needed this door open so that Tsubaki could get to her portion of the safe cracking.

Behind him, someone threw doubles, and three hands crashed onto a pile of cards with a thunderous slam and a volley of cursing. Kid said a few choice words into the cacophony himself, then took a deep breath, spent a moment contemplating pi, and turned around.

"Black Star," he said, choosing him as the most likely one with the skillset he needed, "can you beatbox?"

Star made a face. "Nah man, not my thing, I was working on this recorder beatbox thing for a while but to be honest - "

"I can," Kilik said, climbing to his feet. "Why?"

"My access is compromised somehow," Kid said, waving him over to the terminal. "I've got an emergency override, but I was pretty much counting on never needing it and, if I _did_ for some reason, needing it in pretty much this exact situation."

"O-kay," Kilik said, confusion in his dark eyes, hands stuffed deep in his pockets and clearly wondering just what on earth Kid was even getting at. "And you need me to do what, exactly?"

"I need you to lay me down a beat," Kid said, succinct, and gave him the tempo, fingers drumming like precision gunfire on the terminal's casing. "Square?" Assent, still a bit mystified. "I'll cue you when it's time."

Before he began, Kid turned around, hoping to just head the whole inevitable situation off at the pass. "Black Star, if you want to see this, get over here and for god's sake _maintain a respectful distance or I will end you_."

Star didn't need to be told twice. He collected the cards and came over, Tsubaki behind him, stopping a judicious few feet away and so obviously curious that Kid was waiting for him to start vibrating.

"All right, here we go," he said, and turned back to the terminal, enabled vocal commands and the voice recognition that would make the thing take him seriously. "Commence override: _your crystal ball ain't so crystal clear_."

Breathless silence, a confirmation beep, and the screen flickered to black except for a flashing cursor and the prompt USER?, just the way Kid liked it.

"Username: _last name ever, first name greatest,_ " he said with a certain degree of relish, smothering laugher at how comically wide Star's eyes had gone and how completely dumbfounded Kilik looked and the way Tsubaki was just nonchalant, as though everything about this was totally normal. Then again, Tsubaki blew things up professionally, was a world class safe cracker, and hung around Black Star, so her looking surprised would probably herald the end times.

The terminal beeped again. Kid cued Kilik, closed his eyes, settled into the beat his friend was laying down, and spat, rapid fire, " _I'm a hunter for hire with no plans to retire, and all the sucker MC's can CALL ME SIRE!"_

The door unbolted with a reverberating thunk not unlike the one Black Star's knees made when he hit the floor.

"When the fuck did you become so _unbearably cool_ ," he said, accusatory and looking vaguely awed, which was honestly an expression Kid had never expected to see on Black Star's face unless there was a pile of - who knew, car parts and horrible 90's toys or something - in front of him.

"You look so betrayed," Kid said, turning away from the keyboard to give Star a bemused look. "Like it's Christmas morning and you got everything you asked for but _at what cost_."

"I don't care if you're the world's most superleet hacker," Star said, taking Tsubaki's offered hand up. "You're not _supposed_ to be cooler than the _black knight._ "

"Don't whine, it's very unbecoming," Tsubaki said while Kilik did his best not to break into what would probably qualify as hysterical laughter. "Anyway, I'm going to be working on this for a while, so you'll have plenty of time to step up your game or have rap battles or whatever it is you do so resolve situations like this. Kid, is the room with the vault door safe now?"

Kid nodded, unable to completely contain his smug grin. It had been _so long_ since he'd been around other people like this, since the presence of others had meant _comfort_ rather than _danger_ or _tension_ \- "That particular override disables pretty much everything. I didn't really want to use it, since brute force isn't my style and there's always the chance that it'll trip some monitoring system somewhere that I didn't account for, but for some reason my normal one didn't work." He crossed his arms, shrugged, and gave Black Star a look that hopefully would stave off any feelings of coolness inadequacy the man was grappling with, assuming Black Star could even _feel_ those feelings. "Seeing as it tried to dial out and warn someone when I tried to use my default override, I think we can all be glad that I'd already cut its ability to talk to the outside world. But yes, it's your show now, Tsu."

"Good," she said, collecting her tools again. "It's best if you three stay out here while I work. It's a delicate process, and I need to be able to concentrate." She gave Star a sly look. "And I need quiet. Weren't you guys supposed to be doing something right now anyway?"

"Oh _right_ ," Black Star said, snapping his fingers. "The damn _elevator_. Thing's fishy as hell, I see Stein go in but I never see him come out. Thanks for reminding me, Tsu!"

He took off back down the hallway, and Kid was both confused as to what was going on and glad that his emergency red alert override had unlocked all the doors indefinitely.

"Tsubaki?" he queried, and she laughed, dark eyes fond.

"He has a secret passage to look for, remember?" she asked, standing in the doorway that led onto the massive room that prefaced the multi-ton door of the vault. "And, between us, I think he might have talked to Stein again after Miss Marie did, though I can't prove it. You should go with him, I'm sure he's going to need a little help with the elevator."

Kid shrugged, turned to their other companion. "Kilik?"

"I'll stay here," he said, settling into a corner, deck of cards back in his hands. "In case something comes up."

"Good plan," Kid said, and headed after Black Star, who he could already hear yelling at the elevator. _Very_ good thing all the alarms down here had been disabled, if the man was going to pry at the damn elevator doors. They wouldn't open for him - there was a key that they didn't have for that - but trying was definitely one of many ways to get the police called in when the alarms were actually functioning.

"Yo," Star said once Kid was in earshot, "get in here, dude. We've got places to be."

Kid pulled a face like Star had started speaking Elvish to him - Vulcan, fine, but Elvish was right out - and paused outside the now-open elevator doors, glancing at the guards, who gave him vacant smiles. "Where exactly would we be _going_ right now, Star?"

"Look, bro, I've seen _The Da Vinci Code_ , I know how to figure this shit out," Black Star said, and actually stepped forward and _grabbed_ _Kid by the lapel_ , hauling him into the elevator not by sheer force but because Kid wasn't about to let the man ruin his good suit.

"Oh my god," Kid said once he was free, more than just vaguely horrified. "You _what._ You're going to ruin _everyth -_ "

Star punched something into the elevator panel that Kid didn't catch. The elevator door slid shut, the shitty speaker played a little electronic version of _In The Hall of the Mountain King_ , and suddenly they were moving _down_.

Kid put his face in his hands as the elevator came to a stop, the doors slid open, and none other than Franken Stein said, "And here I was expecting to have to go up and fetch you. Welcome to my little shop of horrors, boys."


	3. My discotech Juliet teenage dream

This, Kid reminded himself, was why he usually _didn't_ spend time with other people in the flesh.

Black Star had wrestled him out of the elevator and Stein had led them into a small lab room that was a chemist's wet dream and also a total _mess_ , seated them at the tiny uncluttered portion of his lab table on stools that appeared to have been the victims of more than one chemical explosion, and then proceeded to serve them something suspicious and steaming out of _beakers_.

"It's coffee," he said when Kid refused to drink it, face crinkling into familiar smile lines. He still refused to drink it. The man had bought into his own con, divorced Marie, taken up with -

"Why are we down here?" Kid asked after a taut minute, doing his best to ignore Black Star slurping coffee beside him. "Is this the part where you truss us up and give us to Medusa as a courting gift instead of upholding your end of the plan we made that involves you actually helping in some way?"

"No," Stein said, and the fatherly smile vanished, replaced by something sharp-edged and hard. "This is the part where I offer you all the evidence your father could ever need to put Medusa away and give you a way to deliver it to him within the hour, among other things. However," he continued when Kid twitched in shock, "that is contingent on _you_ doing _me_ a favor."

"Oh will you _cram it_ with this tough guy routine," Star said, neatly interrupting before Kid could counter. "Just go ahead and say 'sorry for giving in to the dark side, it was temporary insanity that you knocked me out of, Black Star, I owe it all to you and in your honor I'm going to stop acting like a dick and give you a hand.' Just like that, okay? I'm giving you a do-over here, don't blow it."

Stein blinked at Black Star, face falling back into something softer but very tired, and sighed, reaching for his own coffee mug - a mug which, Kid noticed, said 'a hug without U is just mercury,' complete with mercury's chemical symbol. Somehow he kept a straight face, but Stein still noticed and gave him a wry look. "You like my mug? Crona gave it to me to replace my other one, which was apparently upsetting."

Kid said, "Who's Crona?"

Black Star, at higher volume, asked, "What was your other mug?"

Stein took a swig of coffee, then went to the room's far corner and dug around a bit at what Kid assumed was his desk. After a moment he turned back to them and brandished another mug that proclaimed 'according to chemistry, alcohol is a SOLUTION,' and smirked when Black Star began cackling.

"Crona," Stein said after the noise had died down, "is Medusa's only child, whom she is grooming to inherit her vast empire. Sadly, none of this agrees with Crona's temperament or morals, and so we come to that favor I was talking about."

"See," Star said, grinning at Kid, who rolled his eyes. "I told you that he'd come around." He turned back to Stein. "So was all this just an elaborate long con to get the kid out of here?"

"I'd like to tell you yes, but that would be deceitful," Stein said, leaning against his desk. "That said, my unhealthy proclivities are for Marie and I to discuss privately, as always. It will have to be enough for now that I have decided to rectify my mistakes as best I can, and that I have until now deliberately made drugs for her to sell that are not, in and of themselves, overly harmful to the body in moderation." He took a swig of coffee. "I _did_ go in with good intentions, you know."

"You were still _making drugs_ ," Kid pointed out, annoyed and still refusing to drink his coffee. "And _moderation_ isn't exactly the most common trait in drug users."

"Would you have preferred to see what would have come out of this lab if she'd gotten her hands on someone with an even more questionable moral compass than mine to do this work?" Stein asked, and Kid suddenly realized where he'd learned that patient condescension he'd used on the guards earlier. "Besides, it was an unparalleled research opportunity. The documentation should be of very tangible benefit to modern medicine."

"I'll look for your article in all the journals," Kid said, dry as dust, and Stein had the temerity to give him the proud dad face for it.

"I know this is a deviation from your ideal plan, Kid," he said, pushing his glasses back up his nose, "but it won't cause significant trouble and me helping was the eventuality that Marie was hoping for. It's going to make things much less risky."

"And what would you know about _the plan_ ," Kid said, reminded of the real reason he wasn't okay with anything that had happened since Star pulled him into the elevator.

"Marie told me about it, of course," Stein said, giving him a puzzled look. "We had to fit my part into it, so she had to give me the details, otherwise nothing would have worked out properly. That's the real reason Kilik's with you, you know, it's not just heavy lifting - _yes_ , Star, there's a secret tunnel down here. It lets out under the mechanic's shop that serves the private part of the deck, which would put you about five floors below wherever Wes and Spirit are having their little meeting with Mosquito. So Kilik's with you so that when you get out there, he can take care of the cars that way instead of having to get past security like you'd planned."

Kid gave him the longest, hardest stare of his life.

"Look, it's not that big of a deal," Stein said, shrugging again, supremely unbothered. "And speaking of getting past security - Black Star, if I give you night vision goggles, would you be up for going down the tunnel and taking out anyone guarding it? There might not even be anyone, but it's hard to say right now."

"You fuckin' had me at _night vision goggles_ , pops," Star said, eyes lit up like insane fireworks, already off the stool and bouncing on the balls of his feet. "That'd almost make up for your totally uncool behavior lately."

"Don't _kill_ anyone," Kid said, almost drank the coffee on reflex, and pushed it out of easy reach, annoyed.

Star gave him a wide-eyed, incredulous look. "Why the hell would I _kill_ people," he said, not really a question, then looked away when Stein pushed away from his desk and waved him over to a supply cabinet. He had the goggles on in seconds, dialing through settings and giggling madly, and only stopped when Stein inquired as to whether or not he needed supplies.

"Sure don't, daddy-o, I always come prepared," he said, still grinning fit to burst, and dug into one of the pouches on his belt, coming up with a fistful of wide zip ties. "Is the tunnel totally dark?"

"Star," Kid said, very carefully, "why are you carrying around supplies to tie people up?"

"Are you telling me you _aren't?_ " was Star's rejoinder, which made Stein laugh - an unexpectedly warm, sane sound that did more than it should have to alleviate some of Kid's suspicion. "Maybe I was hoping to get lucky, bro. Or maybe I thought that things might get hairy and I might need to hogtie some poor fool, y'know?"

"Um," said a small voice from the lab's other exit, and Kid's head swiveled to size up this new potential threat, took in a slight figure and bubblegum pink hair, an uncertain expression that almost but not quite eclipsed a gleam of mischief. "Do you - do you _pity_ the fools?"

" _Oh my god,_ " Black Star said, looking moderately awed for the second time that night as he pushed the goggles up onto his head. "I don't know who you are, but you're _amazing._ "

"You kids keep me young," Stein said, still chuckling, and strode over to the door to ruffle their visitor's hair affectionately. "Black Star, Kid, this is Crona. Crona, these are your new brothers." A small, dark-haired head poked its way past Crona's legs, and Stein crouched down to pat this new arrival on the head as well. "And this is Angela, who will also be going with you as a favor to Mifune, who, as you may recall, is going to be putting his life on the line for Marie tonight. It's a sad truth that Medusa is happy to use children as hostages against their guardians to ensure that she gets what she wants."

Kid slid off his stool and crossed the lab halfway on autopilot, reminded more than a bit of his own childhood - or at least the part where his father had left him with Marie, who had grabbed him up and spun him dizzy and laughing when he got lonely. Stein stood back up and stepped aside so he could offer his hand to Crona, who looked from it to his face a few times before consenting to a nervous handshake, finger bones even more finely-built than Kid's own and grip steely under the hesitation. By the time they'd said their cautious hellos Angela had wormed her way out from behind Crona and was hugging Kid round the knees, beaming up at him from under the brim of what had to be a home-knitted lizard hat. They regarded each other in silence for a long few moments before Kid finally caved, bent over and let her lock her arms round his neck, straightening with a double armful of giggling child to find Black Star and Stein staring at him like he'd turned into a unicorn.

"What?" he asked, perhaps a bit more snippy than he'd intended, and Angela laughed and buried her face in his neck.

"I have to go before my teeth rot," Star said, setting the goggles back in place and thus ruining any kind of moment that might have been happening, which earned him a disapproving frown from Kid and a snort from Stein.

"Go on, then," Stein said, and shooed him into the room that Crona had come from. "Door's in the back corner under a crate. Let Kid know when things are clear."

"Mission fu- _freakin'_ accepted," Star said, remembering Angela just in time, and bounded through the door with way more spring in his step than was appropriate given the situation.

"Well," Stein said, shutting the door and once again facing Kid from across the tiny lab, "that'll take fifteen, twenty minutes. I know you'd prefer to spend that time giving me the evil eye, but I really do have a huge amount of information for your father, and I'd like to show you some things relevant to the plan."

"Me, too," Crona added, dark eyes somber.

Kid sighed, and chivvied Angela a bit to get her attention. "Don't drool on my suit," he said, and got a solemn nod in response. "Okay, Stein. Go ahead, it's not like I can _leave_."

Stein gave him a slow smile that was really just - way too smug and relieved at the same time for Kid to even acknowledge it, and said, "Nah, I guess you can't, can you."

 

* * *

 

 _"Soul, Harvar, Maka, it's time to get moving,"_ Azusa said over his earpiece, and Soul would have outright fallen to the floor from happiness if it wouldn't have gotten him shot and blown everyone's cover. He'd been eyeing the terrace's railings for a while now - they were very high up, towards the top floors of the casino on an open-air platform done up to look like a Zen garden where only really special guests got to have dinner - and wondering whether or not he'd be able to fling himself off of them before Harvar stopped him or not.

He could really only watch his brother pretend to be Spirit's barely-legal boytoy for so long, though. A man had _limits_. Wes was just as disturbingly good at acting as Spirit was, which Soul guessed made sense considering he'd learned everything he knew from Maka's father and all, but just the _looks_ he'd been giving Spirit made Soul feel like he needed to go shower and then maybe see a priest.

Not Justin, though. The man was only a priest insofar as he did marriages at the 24 hour chapel across the street from the strip club, and anyway he spent most of his free time in the club staring at Blair and drinking horrible beer with Giriko, which didn't really say much for his taste in people or moral standards.

"Maybe you should just _go_ , little girl," Wes sneered, giving Maka the single most awful look Soul had seen so far, and reached across the table to snatch Maka's drink and slam it home with the kind of speed and lack of gag reflex one would expect of him.

"Shut up!" Maka snapped back, pouting and hateful, and Soul half expected her to grab one of the terrace's torches and go after him with it. "He's _my_ papa and I never get to see him! You're just some _floozy_ who's gonna get dumped as soon as somebody prettier shows up!"

"He's _my_ daddy now, honey," Wes said, face smiling poison as he moved in even closer, one hand very high on Spirit's thigh.

"Behave," Spirit said, but did nothing to stop Wes from sliding his hand even higher as he turned to face Mosquito, who had spent a large portion of the dinner looking both offended and entertained. "Sir, I apologize. These two have obviously had a bit too much to drink. Daughter, you may go if you wish. This isn't likely to be an interesting conversation for you - I know you don't like sports cars."

Maka wrinkled her nose in affronted distaste and stood, the rich black material of her dress falling into elegant drapes around her hips as she moved. " _Fine_ ," she said, crossing her arms over her chest. "And I know you aren't planning on buying _me_ any presents, either, you just put me up in this tacky casino to make yourself feel better about neglecting me for _him._ "

"Now, that's simply not _true_ , baby doll," Wes said, and despite everything Soul itched to punch him for just looking at her the way he was. "He sent you here to help him do business. It wasn't anything _personal._ "

To her credit, Maka was _good_. The color rising in her cheeks couldn't be faked, and she even managed to get her eyes to well up, lower lip trembling, before she whirled and _ran_ \- in _really expensive heels_ \- for the door.

Spirit pressed his fingers to his temples and gave Soul and Harvar a very weary look. "Go with her," he said.

"I've got this taken care of," Nygus said from her deceptively casual slouch against the far railing, and Mosquito's bodyguards all gave her looks like they expected to have to fight her to the death at any moment.

"Come on," Harvar muttered, and gave his arm a tug. Soul let himself be led away, or gave that impression; he would honestly have preferred to bolt out of there at top speed, if only to spare himself further nightmare fuel.

Maka, as planned, had already taken the elevator down without them. _"I'm on my way back to the room,"_ she said over the comm. _"I'll get the suitcases stacked up by the door for you, and then I think I might have to shower so I can feel clean again after that."_

"Got it," Harvar said, and hit the button that would call the elevator back.

"My brother macking on your father was really the very last thing I ever wanted to see, even if it was an act," Soul added, wishing he could unsee the entire night.

 _"Yeah,"_ Maka said, truly a stunning example of shared trauma helping people put aside their differences.

Harvar raised an eyebrow at him, though the intent behind it was hard to read thanks to his shades, and ultimately just shrugged it off.

"Patti," he said over the ding of the elevator, "everything good on your end?"

 _"Sure thing, boss! Just waiting for the call,"_ she said. _"Limo's ready to go when you are."_

"Good," Harvar said, settling against the elevator wall. "Shouldn't be _too_ long."

They rode the elevator down to the penthouse suite in silence, listening to Liz's occasional updates on the state of the casino floor and doing their best to ignore Black Star yelling the lyrics to _My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark_ when he finally got to ambush someone in the tunnel under the casino. Maka was waiting for them when they arrived, hauling her huge collection of knockoff Louis Vuitton suitcases over to the door and then retiring immediately to the bathroom once they were all in place.

"Lucky you, getting to take a shower in the middle of this," Harvar said, grabbing two suitcases. "I'll go sweet talk the staff into letting us use their elevator."

Soul nodded and dropped into one of the suite's many plush chairs, hoping to catch a moment of quiet where he could while he waited for Harvar's confirmation that the elevator was safe to use. It was a good thing that Stein had decided to help them, just like Marie had said he would. Their plan for the eventuality where Stein wasn't willing to provide his services wasn't exactly _fun_.

And then: "Hey," Maka called from the bathroom, "are you guys still here? I could use a hand."

Soul took a deep breath, sent up a nebulous prayer for good fortune, and stood back up. "One sec," he replied, and found Maka in the bathroom door, giving him a look that was both relieved and not at all pleased.

"I won't be offended if you were hoping for Harvar," he said, and shrugged: _what can you do_. "What's up?"

"Zipper," she said, and turned around, presenting him with an unexpected view of her bare shoulders and back.

Soul kind of - blinked, and tried to ignore the dusting of freckles across her shoulders, and asked the universe once more for strength. "Do you need me to get the pins out of your hair, too?"

It was a dumb question. She didn't _need_ help with that, for all that it'd make things a lot easier and she'd had someone else style it to start with, but -

"...Yeah, that'd be nice," she said, not looking at him, and Soul was weirdly, mortally glad that he still had the sunglasses on, despite the fact that she wasn't even looking at him.

The pins weren't hard to get out, but they were the same color as her hair, so Soul had to kind of hunt for them in her complicated hairdo, fingers rubbing over Maka's scalp. Somehow he managed to concentrate on that one aspect of the task - on finding those damn pins - so intently that it was at least bearably awkward on his end. It wasn't until he gave up and called it done, reached for her zipper and saw that a flush had crept clear down her neck, that Soul realized what he'd been doing, exactly.

He got her zipper undone and was _gone_ , barely nearby long enough to catch the glint of one green eye over her shoulder as Maka told him thanks before he had a suitcase in either hand and Harvar's affirmative in his ear as he hauled ass down the hall to the elevator.

 

* * *

 

Black Star's triumphant rendition of _Wrecking Ball_ once he was done providing his own soundtrack of Fall Out Boy lyrics was the only affirmative Kid got in terms of whether or not the tunnel was safe, but it hadn't taken him long to get the general hang of deciphering the man's insanity. By then, Stein had passed on what information he felt Kid needed and had assured him that things were well in hand - Kid remembered only after Stein had shown him the huge stack of counterfeit bills he had in his back room that the man, in addition to being a science prodigy, had always been a superlative fence and money launderer as well. With his suspicions allayed enough to allow him to feel safe leaving, he slung the messenger bag of incriminating information over one shoulder, hoisted Angela onto his back, and gave Crona the most encouraging smile he could manage before heading into the now dimly-lit tunnel.

"It isn't a very long walk," Crona said when Kid hesitated, trying to let his eyes adjust to the light and the closed-in space, which was barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side.

"We'll be fine," Kid said, glad that Angela seemed unbothered; he hadn't really been looking forward to the possibility of her getting scared and throttling him by accident. "They're starting to bring the suitcases down, though, so we need to keep moving."

Crona nodded, determined, and led the way. They only spoke once during the trip:

"Hey," Kid said, remembering something that Black Star had said more than once, "is Medusa actually feeding people to her crocodiles?"

"Yes," Crona said without hesitation and seemingly without any discernable reaction. Kid shut his mouth, ignored the chill that crept up his spine, and walked a little faster.

The tunnel did indeed open up under the mechanic's shop, letting them out into one of the in-ground bays used for basic oil changes and offering a close-up view of the underside of a _very_ expensive car, though that was moved quickly enough once they made themselves known.

"Sorry 'bout that," said the man responsible, a muscular character in a cowboy hat who was sporting a really impressive swath of bandages over one eye. "Don't like to leave it uncovered unless I have to. You Kid?"

"Nah man, he's some _other_ dude with ridiculous hair in a suit toting around a small child," Black Star said from somewhere out of sight, and then fixed that by vaulting down into the pit. "Kid, this is Free, my _fuckin' hero._ If he hadn't hurt his eye, he'd be at the monster truck rally driving the Blood Moon for Medusa's entertainment."

"To listen to Blair, Medusa is anything but entertained," Kid said, then gave Free a short handshake. "I appreciate your help. Stein said you had some kind of transportation I could use?"

"Sure do," Free said, beaming, and waved goodbye to Black Star as he disappeared back down the tunnel to help move cash before leading Kid around to the back of the shop.

"There she is," he said once they'd stopped, hooking his thumbs into his belt - which, Kid noticed, had a really unnecessarily huge buckle tooled to look like a wolf's head - and looking just as proud as could be. Kid followed his gaze past sports cars that were worth more than his house, and -

"A _Vespa_ ," he said, incredulous, and Angela craned to look past his head so she could see what was going on.

"Well, I couldn't very well send you out in the Ferrari, now could I?" Free asked, giving him a sidelong look.

"I suppose not," Kid said, and knelt so Angela could climb off his back before accepting the keys from Free. "Crona, can you drive?"

"Yup," Crona said, already fitting the spare helmet over Angela's hat and giving the sidecar and its airbrushed rendition of three wolf moon a dubious look. "I can do lots of things, you know."

"Better safe than sorry," Kid said, and reluctantly put on the driver's helmet. "Hopefully you won't need to drive. You two get settled, we need to go and I don't want to leave you here in case things go wrong."

They did, Angela settling into Crona's lap like this was an everyday occurrence for her - and maybe it was, Kid figured, if Mifune was her guardian. The man had a _history_.

Kid drove them across town via a winding route, listening over his earpiece as Tsubaki cracked the vault door in a flawless victory, her satisfaction palpable when the multi ton door swung open. He heard Soul and Harvar help Kilik and Black Star stuff Maka's suitcases full of cash while Tsubaki laced the vault with explosives, and laughed at their consternation when, just as predicted, all the money in the vault didn't even come close to fitting in the bags. They'd just decided to ferry the rest through the tunnel to Free's shop - he'd promised them that he could arrange some kind of transport - when Kid parked the scooter in an alley, and that was the last he heard for a while.

"Stay here, and stay quiet," he said to Crona and Angela, pulling his earpiece free and handing it over. "I'm not taking you in there - if my father knew about either of you, you'd never get away from him, you know too much - and I'm not going in there wearing a wire, either, because he'd _know_ and then _I'd_ never get away. When I come back, I'll drive you both somewhere safe."

Crona nodded, and Kid squared his shoulders before he headed across the street and into the ancient diner that was his father's favorite, messenger bag slung firmly across his shoulders.

/

Soul had dragged an uncountable number of suitcases across a casino, filled them with stolen cash until they weighed about a million pounds, helped Stein move something like two tons - _literally_ \- of counterfeit money into the vault to replace what they'd appropriated, and then, at last, had to go back up, fetch Maka, and pretend to babysit his spoiled charge while she proved that the club was, realistically, _never_ going to be able to handle her, right now or otherwise. At least the casino staff had long ago been informed of who she was and how they were to treat her; as expected, they congregated in her vicinity, ready to jump at any sign of trouble. They were on edge, too, because the camera feeds were still going in and out at irregular intervals while they were supposedly worked on, and so if there was perhaps more security than usual in her general vicinity - well. It was just because they wanted to make sure she was well taken care of.

Which apparently included making sure that her drink was never less than completely full, Soul noted as he watched a particularly handsome young thing bring her a fresh margarita at the corner table where she'd enshrined herself to drink and pout while everyone else danced.

"Vodka martini please, extra dirty," said a voice from his left, almost yelling over the rumbling music, and Soul swiveled on his bar stool to find Jackie sitting next to him, unconcernedly accepting her drink from the bartender. She tilted her head just enough to give him a sly smile. "And what are you doing exiled to the bar, handsome?"

"Apparently I'm a cockblock and I'm no fun," he said, allowing himself a self-deprecating grin. Maka had dragged him into the dance club attached to the main casino and ditched him at the bar, loudly proclaiming that she wasn't about to have him sit at a table with her and ruin any chance she had of having any actual fun.

Okay, actually she'd said she was going to follow in her father's footsteps and have a night of blackjack and hookers and to hell with being babysat, but that was splitting hairs.

"I put on my good suit, too," he added after a moment, and Jackie laughed and ordered him a Coke.

He _had_ put on his good suit, though, black with pinstripes and a good blood red shirt, and he hadn't paused to ask himself _why_ that had seemed like the thing to do because if he had he'd probably have run for the very distant hills.

"Can't win them all," Jackie said, and clinked their glasses together. "I hear there's a fireworks show later, though. Maybe you can check that out, chicks love fireworks."

Soul gave her a very careful look that she returned, one side of her mouth twitching up in amusement as Soul considered the fact that Jackie, like himself and Maka, was there to provide a diversion, because the best way to commit a crime was to commit as many other crimes as possible at the same time so that no one noticed what you were _really_ up to. Soul suddenly remembered that Jackie and Tsubaki had spent a day closed up together in a room doing _something_ , and his stomach took on a distinctly uneasy quality when he thought about the fact that she'd mentioned fireworks.

"Anyway," she said after a minute, "good luck! Come sit with me later if you strike out, okay?"

And she left, just in time for Kid to mutter, _"Almost back to the deck,"_ over the comm link, to which Black Star said, _"Thought you ain't no hollaback girl, bro, but we could use some help hauling all this cold hard cash so I guess it's okay, I guess we can share,"_ at which point Kid's eyeroll was _palpable_ and Soul might have asked the bartender to add some liquor to his Coke.

 _"Harvar,"_ Azusa said, interrupting whatever other chatter might have been about to happen, _"get Patti to drop you off at the club. We need you to get Spirit's car and head over to the casino as soon as you can."_

 _"Acknowledged,_ " Harvar said. _"What happened?"_

Azusa cleared her throat. _"Franken Stein should not be driving,"_ she said, _"and we have a couple of refugees here that don't need to stay here."_

 _"I think my favorite monster truck is the Pussy Wagon,"_ Blair said over the comm, almost meditatively, then perked up. _"Did you say something, Azusa? It's hard to hear over all these massive engines and screaming men."_

"Negative," Azusa said, and Soul was still kind of chuckling at Blair's neat denial of any sensitive information that she might need to report to Shinigami when Maka grabbed the back of his jacket and dragged him off the stool.

"The fuck," he said, windmilling his arms in an effort not to fall over, and Maka torqued him around so that he ended up in front of her.

"We're dancing," she said, shouting into the abrupt silent break between songs as the DJ switched sets.

"Um," he said, blinking down at her and then raising his eyes to take in the scene she'd pulled him into.

"I know you love _Pulp Fiction_ ," she said, but Soul was too busy realizing that they were standing in a clear space on the dance floor, that they were being _watched_ , to do anything aside from nod - at least until the music started.

"Maka," he said, as the opening bit started - the opener, he realized, from the movie scene, introducing the dance contest - but then it was way too late, the music had picked up and Maka was already twisting her way into Uma Thurman's dance moves, giving him a look the whole time that kind of made Soul want to run for cover.

Well. It made him want several things, to be honest, but mostly it was terrifying and all he could think was - weren't they supposed to be robbing a casino? On the other hand, this was literally their job at the moment, making a scene and distracting security and as many employees as possible. At least Soul knew the dance by heart, thanks actually to Black Star insisting they learn it one week when it was too hot to go outside.

 _"The hell are you guys doing,"_ Ox said over Soul's earpiece, but he didn't have time to reply. _"The casino staff are kind of freaking out."_

"Giving them a show," Maka replied without missing a step, still staring at him, still - _drunk_ , Soul realized. _That_ was no part of the plan at all. "Come on, boy, move those hips, you've got the easy part."

The crowd was _cheering_. They were joining in, some who knew the dance and some who had no idea, and Soul begged the universe at large to hold things together long enough for them to get out of Medusa's accursed casino. He could see security starting to cluster at the doors as the song wound down, and okay, maybe that was their goal with this, but Maka smelled like she'd taken a bath in blackberry margaritas and the flush spreading over her face and neck and shoulders wasn't faked this time.

"Jackie," he said into the mic on his collar, "heads up on whatever distraction you've got set up. Everyone else, you better get moving."

Then the song wound down and Soul came to a stop, out of breath and staring down at Maka, whose eyes had still never left his and whose very nice blouse had come partially undone and was showing a scandalous amount of collarbone. For a second or two he just stared at her, trying to figure out what the _fuck_ , then gave up and said, "I'm gonna get you some water." He was maybe three quarters of the way back to the bar and the promised water when the yelling started. It felt like every hair on his body stood up; he turned slowly, a man cognizant that he is facing his doom, to see Maka, up on the table she'd been sitting at and dancing in a way that would have made Blair very proud but mostly made Soul wish he had a paper bag to breathe into.

"Jackie," he said, very slowly, "I need a fucking _out_."

 

* * *

 

Likewise, Kid would have been much more alarmed at the apparent breakdown happening in Soul's neck of the woods if he hadn't returned to Free's shop, headed up to the roof level of the attached parking deck to check on Spirit and Wes, and found something so bizarre and improbable and nightmare-spawning that he couldn't even bring himself to look away.

"Guys," he said, thankful that Soul had kept his S.O.S. short and sweet, "we have a bit of a situation up here."

That was putting things very mildly. Nygus was still in the process of subduing Mosquito's guards, and Kid only had a second to parse the situation before he threw himself at the only guard still upright, lashing out with one foot quickly enough to take the guy's kneecap well out of joint, which thankfully distracted him too much to use his gun.

"Black Star," he yelled into his mic, "get the fuck up here, we need those zip ties!"

To his credit, Star moved fast when he needed to. He'd been down below, helping load cash into the 'ride' that Free had procured for them, which had turned out to be a tiny woman named Eruka driving a _6x6 military transport_. Regardless, Star was up top about thirty seconds later, very solicitously hog-tying everyone on the roof while Kid stared agog at the scene that had initially provoked his call for help.

Wes Evans was sprawled across the hood of a very orange and very heavily modded RX-7, _in flagrante delicto_ if Kid had ever seen it or understood the phrase: jacket gone, shirt unbuttoned, tie hanging loose over his chest, hand halfway down his pants and creeping lower as his hips undulated in a way that frankly gave new meaning to the word _obscene_. He was _staring at Spirit_ , eyes heavy-lidded and Kid felt _wrong_ just being _near_ this; Spirit looked like he was about ten seconds away from complete heart failure. It might, Kid thought with the tiny part of his brain that was still functioning correctly, have something do with the way Wes was moaning _Daddy_ , but it was really just - hard to say. Might have been the way his lips were parted just so, good lord but the boy _was_ a stripper, he knew how to do these things better than most.

"Wow," Black Star said, leaving the last guard for Nygus to double check once she was done dealing with Mosquito, which apparently involved delivering him to Free for storage. "Lookit him poppin' them hips. What the hell happened?"

 _"My husband is in the business of making drugs, you tell me,"_ Marie said over the comm, the first time all night she'd made herself known, and Kid jumped a little. _"He tells me that it's harmless, but Wes probably got more than he should have so things are going to get pretty weird. It was meant to be a truth serum, by the way, so whatever he's doing is, ah, from the heart."_

Kid and Black Star shared a quietly horrified look. After a second Star did two things: pulled out his phone to take pictures, and said, over his mic, "It's not even summer, why does the DJ keep on playing summertime sadness?"

 _"WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED, ARE YOU GUYS OKAY,"_ Soul said almost immediately, sounding more than slightly stressed and with a distinct sound of crashing in the background.

Spirit was still staring, helpless, jaw slowly dropping as Wes popped the button on his suit pants, and Black Star snapped a picture for Soul's benefit.

The comm spat an inchoate garble of what could have been static or could have actually been the sound of Soul's brain melting.

"So I take it the _#SELFIE_ reference was some kind of secret code for - all this," Kid said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the carnal sin unfolding on the car hood.

"Sort of," Star said, snapping more pictures and then switching over to filming actual video.

Kid was still trying to decide just what they were supposed to do about this situation when Nygus came back and very calmly walked over to Spirit and swept his legs out from under him, effectively destroying whatever moment he'd been having. She went from there to Wes with no pause, grabbed him by the lapels of his shirt and hauled him to his feet so she could shake him.

" _Weston Rhys Evans, get your shit together,_ " she said in her best angry parent voice, and Wes sort of twitched, blinked rapidly and finally managed to focus his eyes with something like actual lucidity. "We don't have time for this, boy, we need to _get out of here_ if you don't want to get caught or _murdered_."

"Kilik," Kid said to his mic, "you should come up here, we need you to take care of these cars ASAP."

Kilik appeared after something like a minute and started popping hoods and disabling onboard computers, and Kid was really truly grateful that Spirit and Wes had pretended to be as stuck up and picky as they had, because it meant all the cars were already unlocked and ready to go.

"All right, show's over," Nygus said once she was sure that Wes had snapped out of whatever pornographic headspace he'd been in. "Kid, you're in the transport. Star, pick a car. We don't have time to be fooling around."

 _"I'm getting Maka out of here NOW,"_ Soul said over the comm as Kid was jogging back down to the transport. _"I hope you guys are ready."_

"Ready enough, I think," Kid said, and Free gave him a thumbs up that he took to mean that all the money had been loaded up. "Jackie?"

 _"Ready and waiting,"_ she said, the club's bass thump audible in the background. _"We're about to take 'throw some glitter, make it rain' to a whole new level."_

 _"I'm heading in,"_ Marie said. _"Hold your fire until they take me into the back, kids, or I'll have set myself up as bait for nothing."_

 _"Standing by,"_ Jackie said, followed by Tsubaki's _"Vault's ready to blow on your mark."_

Kid climbed into the cabin of the transport to find Eruka waiting for him.

"Hey," she said, "look. I'll let you take this thing if you can promise that me and Free aren't going to get arrested. If you can't make that happen, Free's coming with me and I'm going with _you_."

"We've already ensured that Lord Death isn't going to be causing you any grief," Kid said. "I can't keep him from questioning you, but he's got more than enough information to put Medusa away already. I'll ask him to let you two be. You did help us, after all."

Eruka gave him a long, searching stare, and finally nodded. "Fine, take it. Send me a present once you're safe, all right?"

Kid smiled at that, happy to agree, and slid into the driver's seat hoping his legs were long enough to reach the clutch.

 

* * *

 

Soul actually _carried_ Maka out of the casino, because she just _would not_ let herself be led away from the grade A shitshow she'd started, not even when security threatened to cuff her and call the cops. Rather than let her call their bluff - if indeed it _was_ a bluff, daddy's money only went so far, he was sure - he just swept her off her feet in the most literal sense, scooping her into his arms and doing his best to ignore the way she swore at him. It was harder to ignore the fact that she tried to fucking break his collarbone, but she was drunk and combat trained and had had a rough night, so he let that go as soon as it happened since she didn't succeed.

" _Maka,"_ he said on his way out the casino doors, hugging her tight to his chest so she couldn't struggle as much. " _Chill._ Everything is fine, we've gotta go."

"Everything is _not_ _fine_ , you didn't care about me enough to leave Las Vegas with me," she yelled into his shirt, and Soul picked up the pace in an effort to get away from the casino entrance before she really caused a problem.

"Calm down," he said, rubbing his thumb over the joint of her shoulder in the only comforting gesture he could think of given their current positions. "It's fine, I've got you. Please don't be mad at me for something that happened when we were nineteen, I was an idiot back then and I'd really prefer it if we didn't have to yell about this right now."

" _Fuck off_ , you're an idiot _now,_ " she snapped, and somehow managed to turn her back on him while being carried.

The Las Vegas Strip was, as ever, crowded; it was crowded pretty much every hour of every day, and one guy carrying a drunk girl home was hardly cause for comment. What _was_ , at least for Soul, was the fact that he was accosted by a battered Lincoln Towncar a little ways down the street from Medusa's place, with none other than Justin behind the wheel.

"Get in," said the world's worst priest, and Soul wasn't really in the mood to tell him no, even if he _did_ have like ten rosaries hanging from his rearview mirror.

"Thanks," he said, and gave up trying to get Maka in the back seat by herself after maybe ten seconds, because she wouldn't let the fuck go of his shirt for some reason. He slid in with her and settled into the huge car's plush seats with a sigh. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Work," Justin said, and glanced at him over the back of his seat. "I'll just cut to the chase and tell you I've been working undercover for Shinigami for years now. Lucky for you, this isn't part of my official duties, and I'm entirely inclined to take you wherever you need to go and get back here as quickly as I possibly can and with no memory of us ever conversing. Is Maka drunk?"

"Very," Soul said, and she thumped him in the chest in protest, making him wheeze in the middle of telling Justin where her car was.

"I got it," he said, and took off down the Strip at a speed that made Soul inclined to just shut his eyes and wait for either the car to stop or for them to get into an accident.

"Good luck, kids," he said when they got to the car, and Soul finally got Maka out of his lap and standing on her own. "If we don't meet again, know that I was rooting for you."

The Lincoln trundled away and Soul turned to Maka, prepared to fight her for her keys, but she'd already fished them out of her bra and handed them over without even a comment.

"Is everyone okay?" she asked, gone from yelling to subdued without any warning.

Soul cocked his head, listened to his earpiece a little more carefully. "I think so," he said, glad that she was drunk enough that he hadn't had to explain the horrible death noise he'd made when Black Star sent him those pictures of his brother. That was something better left for when she was sober, he thought. "They're about to trip all the alarms, we're almost done. Just gotta get out of town, which I think your _Datsun_ can manage."

"We could run away together," she said, ignoring his jab, one hand trailing across the immaculate blue paint of her 280ZX.

"Um," Soul said, and decided to steer her over to the passenger door rather than respond to that - or anything she'd said in the past little while, really - directly.

She let herself be moved, and got into the passenger seat without complaint - then caught his arm when he tried to leave, green eyes glinting up at him in the orange of the streetlights.

"I mean it," she said, and Soul stayed for a moment, looked down at her and, at length, _finally_ removed his shades, tucking them into the collar of his shirt.

"You're drunk," he said, and sank to one knee, heedless of the damage it would do to his very expensive suit. "But if it makes you feel better, technically we _are_ running away together."

She stared at him, and didn't need to explain that that _obviously_ wasn't what she'd meant.

Until Marie had called for them, they hadn't spoken in _five years_ , and now was not the time to start talking out their issues. That would of necessity have to wait, but -

Soul sighed and shifted, reached forward and pulled Maka into his arms, because the girl looked like she really, _really_ needed a hug.

"I was just being a dick because I don't know what to do about you," she drunk-grumbled into his hair, and Soul squeezed her a bit and reconsidered, because maybe they could just work this out real fast before the life or death car chases started and things got even more complicated than they already were. "It was easier to stop talking to you than to try and work it out. I just wanted you to _be there - "_

And then Jackie yelled _"Fire in the hole!"_ and they jumped apart, Maka back into her seat and Soul nearly into traffic.

By the time he was in the driver's seat he could hear Wes, drugged out of his gourd and apparently driving like a demon, singing _Total Eclipse of the Heart_ while Spirit tried not to have a heart attack for the second time that night.

 _"Wes is fine,"_ Tsubaki reported, presumably from the passenger seat of whatever car Black Star had stolen. _"He might be hallucinating pink unicorns but his driving is perfect, and the pictures Black Star showed me have scarred me for life."_

 _"Giriko's been called in,"_ Azusa reported, _"so we should be wrapping this up soon."_

"Goody," Maka grumbled, seatbelt fastened and head leaning wearily against her window.

Soul gave her a sympathetic look, wished he had some water for her, and cranked the car - and _jumped._

"Aw, _grrrrrrrrrrrrl,_ " he said in surprised, slightly adrenaline-fueled approval, "this engine ain't stock _at all_."

"No it damn well isn't," Maka said without moving, though her one visible eye was giving him a challenging and maybe somewhat amused look. "So don't fuck up."

Soul pressed on the gas, listened to the engine snarl, and started laughing before he even put the car into first. "Oh, _Maka_ ," he said, nearly delirious with exhaustion and stress and what Black Star liked to call feels poisoning, "I won't. Believe me, I won't, not this time."

 

* * *

 

"I can't believe you actually stole that car and kept it," Soul said to Black Star something like a week after the fact, standing on a shoreline far, far away from Las Vegas and staring down at the RX-7 that had had his brother half naked on the hood the last time he'd seen it.

"It was my present to myself," Star said, petting it possessively. "I have so many great memories of this car already, I couldn't leave it behind. Anyway, _I_ can't believe that Justin and Giriko fucking ran off together. Last I heard from Kid, once Giriko was done helping Shinidaddy's men arrest Medusa, they skipped town and settled down on some tropical island to drink mai tais together until death do they part. I guess all that sitting at the strip club drinking shitty beer together formed an unbreakable bond or something."

"You'll have to excuse me," Maka said, coming to stand beside Soul, "when I point out that Giriko and Justin settling down to - what was it Giriko wanted to do, again? Pottery? Chainsaw sculpture? Anyway, you have to grant that it's a lot less weird and disturbing than the fact that _my_ _father_ and _Wes Evans_ are about to buy a beachside villa together."

The look Black Star gave her made her reach for her knife, but that didn't stop him for longer than two seconds.

"But _Maka,"_ he said, "now you have _two_ daddies! And Soul has a new brother in law, right? Doesn't that make your father also your brother when you two inevitably get married? And answer me honestly - are you just upset about them buying a place because you and Soul didn't get to go house shopping first?"

"If I had to guess," Tsubaki said, sauntering over from where she'd been helping Kilik grill an army's worth of steaks and burgers, "I'd say that right now she's mostly upset because she promised me that _I_ could be the one to end you when you finally became completely unbearable, Star."

"If I'm upset about anything, actually," Maka said, accepting the beer Tsubaki had brought her, "it's that we don't know what happened to Mifune."

"He'll turn up," Star said, waving one hand in dismissal. "Anyway, Kid's helping Marie and Stein take care of Angela and it's fuckin' _adorable,_ you should see the pictures."

Soul had wandered off somewhere in the midst of that sentence so he could sit in the RX-7's driver's seat, maybe just rub his fingers over the steering wheel, see what the clutch felt like, sigh over it covetously a little.

Except there was a weird little noise when he dropped into the seat, and after a minute he decided he couldn't just let that go - you didn't just _ignore_ weird noises with a car like this - and started poking around in the back.

"Uh, Star," he said a minute later, interrupting the gossip session. "Were you aware that there's a _jar of scorpions_ back here?"

Black Star climbed in from the other side, eyes wide. _"Scorpions?_ I checked this thing top to bottom, _Kilik_ checked it top to bottom, those _weren't there,_ I mean I guess they're kinda cool, but - "

They were interrupted by Black Star's text alert. He eased back out of the car, eyeing the jar as though expecting it to explode at any moment, and for maybe the first time ever Soul saw the man go pale.

"Turns out that Arachne likes to send scorpions to people," he said, sounding a bit faint.

"Well, _fuck,_ " Maka said, just as Star's phone went off again.

Soul was out of the car by the time Black Star spoke again, watching him over its roof as he scrolled through whatever text barrage he'd just gotten.

"So," he said after a minute. "I, uh. Marie wants us to get our asses to her place like _yesterday_."

Soul sighed and pushed away from the RX-7, nodded to Maka as he headed for her 280ZX. "Guess we're packing the steaks to go, huh?"

"You're worried about the _steaks_ ," she said, "and I'm gonna ignore the opportunity for a pun there, but - "

She'd followed him, clearly unconcerned with the food herself, and Soul cut her off by grabbing her arm and pulling her into a hard kiss. "I _know_ ," he said when they broke apart. "Let's fucking _go_."

"I'm driving," she said, and he wasn't about to argue.


End file.
